For his early shows with Mary Boone, Loeb made paintings by lifting and recombining individual elements from magazines, books and films. Of his 1999 exhibition with White Cube in London, one critic wrote: “Combining the precise Photo-Realism of Richard Estes with the mute angst of Edward Hopper, Loeb creates a sense of helplessness that is mesmerizing.” Loeb himself avoided the term photorealism, explaining his goal is to reproduce the feeling of a memory rather than the exact imagery of a photograph. “I use transparency and pigment to emphasize something photos can't.“ Despite the fact that many of his contemporary peers copied photographic works wholesale, charges of copyright infringement continued to dog Loeb through the late 1990s.