Elger Esser Interviews

http://eastsidefm.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/01-Track-01-1.mp3

It was interesting to hear him talk about how there is no more untouched nature, he is talking about how people have always been there before. He feels like this because when he grew up in Rome, he felt that there was so much history there that nothing is purely untouched nature anymore.


http://eastsidefm.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/02-Track-02-1.mp3

time delay long term breath, a kind of beauty that we are looking through, but we are looking at them today like a time delay, its like time travel. You cannot date the image, they are not so much romantic.
He says he has to understand the landscape, and he can only do that if he can travel through the landscape - deeply European view on things

http://eastsidefm.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/03-Track-03-1.mp3

He wanted to work with photography, but not be a photographer

Listening to an interview, helped me to appreciate his work more. It is a European look on the touched natural world around him. In france, as he needed to look on something European, it is a work of time somewhere in time, but not quite defined. It could be anywhere between the present day, and the birth of photography.

Elger Esser Research

The son of a German author and French photojournalist, Esser grew up in Rome. "I grew up with German values, but with a certain Italian and French spirit," he explained. And because of that, he had a different perspective on the world. "If you're a child growing up in a city like Rome, where you are confronted with over 3,000 years of history, you have a very different concept of time."

Esser always saw modernity as fractured. His critical take on modernity didn't only win him friends, Esser explained.He was surprised when he first came to his father's homeland, and was irritated by the German attitude towards modernity. Modernity was seen as a panacea, not only in art but in architecture, too. A thirst for the future may have been understandable after the First and Second World Wars, but it caused a lot of damage after 1945.

This view of history, art and of culture permeates Esser's work - and his life. "Germany is a very dear country to me, I much admire it. I don't know whether I love it though," he said.

He lives in Germany "in order to retain a sense of longing for the other." One "other" would be France, his mother's homeland. Esser travels there five to six times a year to photograph. At some point he wants to chart the entire country in photographs. "Landscapes are like states of mind," he said, "Everyone carries a landscape within them, one they naturally idealize."

http://www.dw.de/elger-esser-captures-the-landscapes-of-longing/a-16085726

Elger Esser’s pale, luminous landscape photographs, which are almost entirely unpeopled and frequently feature a straight, low horizon line, have been compared to both early-19th-century photography and Dutch landscape paintings of the 17th century. Like other German photographers such as Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, Esser studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher in Dusseldorf. His images typically capture European lowlands— softly lit beaches, wetlands, valleys, or riverbeds—in which Esser evokes the sublime. Imbuing his landscapes with a quiet romance, Esser models his style on postcard images, which have fascinated the artist since childhood.

https://www.artsy.net/artist/elger-esser

I am not sure how I feel when I look at his images, maybe as I write this I feel tired and unresponsive, I do feel that I wish I saw his work when writing my dissertation because like the text talks about is relative to dutch painting. As I know little about Dutch landscape painting, this would have been the best time to get properly informed so I could reference this in my dissertation.

I did a little research into Dutch Landscape painting to find this:

It is "A Wooded Landscape" 1663 by Meindert Hobbema. This almost looks like a modern English landscape around Guildford or something, the dirty road running through the picture reminds me of farm tracks or paths that I have encountered on the North Downs Way.