Elger Esser

Elger Esser (b. 1967) works mainly in the medium of photography and is one of the most important members of the Becher School from Dusseldorf. From early in his career, he explored historic landscape photography, which has had, and continues to have, a huge influence on his work. For the most part, the analog images that he subsequently subjects to further processing, are taken by the sea or by rivers, most of them in France. Often, his images are dominated by imposing cloud formations. Elger Esser. The Narrow Waters presents more than sixty depictions of river landscapes created by Esser over the last twenty-five years. Again and again, the artist traces the literary trail of famous writers such as Proust, Maupassant, and Flaubert. Several of the images show the Èvre, a tributary of the Loire, which French author Julien Gracq (1910-2007) described in his essay collection The Narrow Waters. Selected passages from his writings are presented alongside Essers’ post-romantic landscapes.