Elger Esser


Endlessly extending horizons; deserted, lunar, swampy terrains; the sea merging with the sky; a river slowly flowing; a rugged cliff—these are the subjects of Elger Esser’s recent photographs. Although the German artist portrays landscapes, it is not the landscaped element that predominates. The setting is only an instrument, a pretext adopted after lengthy reflection on the potential of the photographic image. It is not nature that is the subject of his work, but rather the capacity for representing the physical and psychic conditions of vastness and emptiness.

Esser photographs slices of absence, which is why he is compelled to shun urban spaces, places of “civilization,” of a culture that disposes with the precious intervals of unproductiveness. Yet he is not being contentious, he is simply making an observation. Esser is trying to find a sense of equilibrium, first of all for himself: His landscapes obviously approach the world as he himself perceives and experiences it during his long travels through France, Holland, and Italy.

Indeed, the crux of his photographs is a reflection on space. The images are almost completely devoid of objective references that might encourage the eye to meander or the mind to single out oppositions allowing for dialectic. The emerging details are few and minimal; the forms that are offered up from his expansive images are boundless plains, expansive seas, earth, marshes, and skies in which the eye loses itself. They are images without limits, imagined expressly for a gaze that is required to survey and defy its very borders in order to overcome the obstacle of vision itself. In this sense, the visual and the mental space converge…


The full text is published in "tema celeste" No. 89, January - February 2002.




Guglielmo Gigliotti