Sun, Shadows, Stone: The Photography of Terry Toedtemeier by Julia Dolan, Rock Hushka, Toby Jurovics, Jennifer Kabat, Andrew Meigs, Sandra S. Phillips, Prudence F. Roberts

Abstract

99 Reviews and practices can become debilitating, if not deadly, and are often intergenerational. For readers familiar with the literature on Indigenous child removal, historical trauma, and social services for tribal communities, Harness ’s book aligns with other authors who have made this work their focus, including Kristen A. Carpenter, Lorie M. Graham, Sarah Deer, Devon Mihesuah, and Margaret D. Jacobs (who cites Harness’s 2009 book). What Bitterroot adds to these studies, however, is the power of a personal perspective on abuse, survival, and policy reform. Her anthropological research has also made clear the vast extent of abuses endured by Native children adopted into nonIndian households. Remarkably, Harness has converted her childhood and early adulthood traumas into a story that can save lives. Bitterroot will be a soothing balm, an extended hand, to anyone who faces the demons of abuse and trauma and is an authoritative guide to those seeking to understand the historical and social structures that perpetuate the vulnerability of Indigenous children and families today. Katrina Jagodinsky University of Nebraska SUN, SHADOWS, STONE: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF TERRY TOEDTEMEIER by Julia Dolan, Rock Hushka, Toby Jurovics, Jennifer Kabat, Andrew Meigs, Sandra S. Phillips, and Prudence F. Roberts Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, Washington, 2018. Photographs. 136 pages. $24.95 cloth. This handsome volume was published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title at the Tacoma Art Museum in 2018 and the Portland Art Museum in 2019. The book itself provides a gallery of Terry Toedtemeier’s stunning black-and-white photographs of Oregon terrain and geology (plus several early photos of the artist’s friends in 1970s Portland). The images are preceded by essays by the authors who discuss the contexts informing Toedtemeier’s vision and creativity. Terry Toedtemeier (1947–2008) pursued several practices that together established his reputation as a legendary figure in Oregon photography . He was, of course, a photographer who was self-taught and highly skilled. He was also a geologist (with a degree from Oregon State University ) and a historian, collector, and curator of photography. The authors discuss these diverse but related pursuits from their various perspectives : Dolan, Hushka, Juroviks, and Phillips are museum curators; Meigs is a geologist; Roberts is an art historian and Toedtemeier’s widow; and Kabat is an essayist who has traversed much of the territory that fascinated Toedtemeier. These writings cover some forty pages and provide a multi-faceted introduction to Toedtemeier’s photographs, about eighty in all, created from 1974 to 2008. Hushka provides the most complete biography , starting with Toedtemeier’s childhood explorations of Johnson Creek near his home in east Portland. He and other authors emphasize Toedtemeier’s fascination with and love of Oregon’s tumultuous, basalt-anchored terrain, and his use of photography to provide not only information but also a sense of wonderment and transcendent awe. In geological forms, Toedtemeier found signs of a vast arc of time (timeless time, really) that, for him, was astonishing and humbling. He also saw sublime aesthetic beauty in the geological record, especially in the Columbia Gorge and the Oregon coast. Yet grandiosity of image was not his game, and his photographs inspire quiet reflection. Meigs discusses the Northwest’s geology, Phillips locates Toedtemeier’s work in the context of the history of photography (the photographs of Carleton Watkins were of great interest to him, for instance), and Dolan writes of Toedtemeier’s work as the first curator of photography at the Portland Art Museum. Mentioned by various authors is his magnificent Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867–1957, a massive book and a major exhibition in 2008, which was an expansion of an earlier version in 1984. Prudence Roberts focuses on a single photograph — Ocean X (1978) — a beautiful work that became famous for its scientific documentation of a soliton, a non-linear wave. Scientists found in Toedtemeier’s photograph, of two such waves intersecting to form a perfect X, visual evidence of the behavior of solitons and a basis for building a formula to explain them. 100 OHQ vol. 121, no. 1 Roberts’s essay is the only one to focus extensively on a particular photograph. Specific analysis of the visual properties...