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Lot Essay
"I seek places, not to document them as such, but rather to use the encounter with them to make a picture" (Elger Esser, in Art in America, 1999).
Elger Esser's Paris is a contemporary attempt to capture the mystery of landscape through the lens of a camera. The photograph depicts Paris as an apparently romantic riverside town, where Esser has manipulated its atmosphere as much as its appearance through the digital reworking of his original image. He uses this manipulation to increase the crispness and detail in the photograph, and to alter the tones of light and colour, suffusing the image with a hazy light that introduces a tension between reality and representation, apparently borrowing from the painterly techniques of evoking atmosphere and mood through illusionistic light play, yet subverting it via the pyrotechnics of the cool, detached modern photographic processes.
Esser's Paris exudes lyrical spirit and tranquillity. It is reminiscent of an early 19th Century painting. The Romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich are referenced and re-interpreted, the lanscape still monumental but the locus altered to a quasi urban setting and suffused by an unreal and haunting light that lingers in the imagination.
Elger Esser's Paris is a contemporary attempt to capture the mystery of landscape through the lens of a camera. The photograph depicts Paris as an apparently romantic riverside town, where Esser has manipulated its atmosphere as much as its appearance through the digital reworking of his original image. He uses this manipulation to increase the crispness and detail in the photograph, and to alter the tones of light and colour, suffusing the image with a hazy light that introduces a tension between reality and representation, apparently borrowing from the painterly techniques of evoking atmosphere and mood through illusionistic light play, yet subverting it via the pyrotechnics of the cool, detached modern photographic processes.
Esser's Paris exudes lyrical spirit and tranquillity. It is reminiscent of an early 19th Century painting. The Romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich are referenced and re-interpreted, the lanscape still monumental but the locus altered to a quasi urban setting and suffused by an unreal and haunting light that lingers in the imagination.