Elger Esser German, b. 1967

Elger Esser (b. 1967) is renowned for his contemplative landscape photographs, whose expansive views of rivers, coastlines, and wetlands evoke the stillness and atmosphere of nineteenth-century painting and early photography. Distinguished by low horizons, muted tonalities, and diffuse, luminous light, his images recall the romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, the atmospheric sensibility of Pictorialism, and the antique postcards that have fascinated him since childhood. “I am interested in capturing and preserving subjective memories, time and tranquillity,” he has stated. Trained under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Esser emerged from the influential Düsseldorf School but departed from its systematic, conceptual approach, retaining the formal precision of large-format photography while embracing the poetic and emotional possibilities of landscape.

Born in Stuttgart, Germany, to the writer Manfred Esser and French photographer Régine Esser, Esser spent his childhood in Rome before moving to Düsseldorf in 1986. After working as a commercial photographer, he entered the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1991, becoming a master student in 1996 and completing his studies in 1997. Unlike contemporaries such as Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, Esser pursued a distinctly romantic vision, grounded in photographic craftsmanship and an engagement with the history of the medium. A formative journey to Lyon in 1996 marked a turning point, inspiring his sustained exploration of remote, seemingly timeless landscapes. His practice incorporates historic photographic processes, including heliogravure and silver gelatin printing, as well as images printed directly onto silver-coated copper plates, reinforcing the material and temporal qualities of his work.

Esser's photographs frequently emerge from geographic and literary journeys, drawing inspiration from Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, and Guy de Maupassant. Cap d’Antifer – Étretat (2002) explores the Normandy coast through the writings of Flaubert and Maupassant, while Combray (2016) evokes the landscapes of Proust's literary imagination. In Nocturnes à Giverny (2012), he photographed Claude Monet's gardens at night, and Morgenland (2017) brought together a decade of journeys along the Nile, the Lebanese coast, and the Sea of Galilee. Commissioned by the French state to commemorate the millennium of Mont-Saint-Michel, Esser created Mémoire Céleste, a photographic meditation on the abbey and its surrounding tidal landscape. Throughout these projects, he approaches landscape as a repository of memory, where history, literature, and personal experience converge.

Esser served as professor of photography at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design from 2006 to 2009 and was a fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in 2012. In 2016, he received the Oskar Schlemmer Prize.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery presented Esser's first solo exhibition in New York, Inherent Time, in 2020.