Sandra S. Phillips

Photographer and curator Terry Toedtemeier (1947–2008) began his career in the 1970s with extensive photographic experiments to capture his close circle of friends and colleagues. Largely self-taught, he began to attract wider critical attention with his landscape images, initially snapshots from his moving car and later exquisite compositions influenced by his deep understanding of both historical and contemporary photography traditions of the American West. His haunting photographs often focused on the Oregon desert and coastline, and magnificent basalt formations of the Pacific Northwest. Sun, Shadows, Stone is the first scholarly monograph of the photography of Terry Toedtemeier. His photographs were featured in the nationally traveling exhibition Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan and are in the collections of many museums including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Philadelphia Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

In northwest Russia, in a small village called Alekhovshchina, Nadia Sablin’s aunts spend the warmer months together in the family home and live as the family has always lived-chopping wood to heat the house, bringing water from the well, planting potatoes, and making their own clothes. Sablin’s lyrical and evocative photographs, taken over seven summers, capture the small details and daily rituals of her aunts’ surprisingly colorful and dreamlike days, taking us not only to another country but to another time. Alevtina and Ludmila, now in their seventies, seem both old and young, as if time itself was as seamless and cyclical as their routines-working on puzzles, sewing curtains, tatting lace, picking berries, repairing fences-and as full of the same subtle mysteries. Sablin collaborated with her aunts to recreate scenes she remembered from her childhood and to make new images of the patterns of their days. In these photographs, Sablin combines observation and invention, biography and autobiography, to tell the stories of her aunts’ life together, and in the process, quilts together a thoughtful meditation on memory, aging, and belonging.