Following the Thread

After my parents divorced in 1973, my mother took me and my two brothers to live in Israel. We were at the tail-end of a large movement of Americans who immigrated to Israel after the 1967 Six-Day War, most of whom moved for religious and ideological reasons. 

My mother, like many American women of the time, had grown dissatisfied with her role as a homemaker and wife, and had started to push the envelope of what was expected of her. She wasn’t exactly a hippie but she definitely caught the wave of ideas of collectivism and socialism in the late 1960s and early 70s. Intellectually, she was in harmony with the idea of group collective solutions. Both my parents were questioning and rejecting many mainstream American mores, such as capitalism and the constraints of the nuclear family. At the same time, divorce was becoming more common and less stigmatized. They tried couples therapy for a while, but it didn’t stick.  

For a long time I thought of my mother as confused post-divorce, but speaking to many who knew her back then, she was in no way confused. She knew she was going to need help raising her three children; she had also heard about the socialist environment of Israel’s kibbutzim, and felt a sincere desire to “get back to her roots” of Judaism. She sought out and found the Israel Aliya Center and won sponsorship from the World Zionist Organization, which organized and helped fund our move to Israel. We spent nearly four years living on kibbutz Mishmar Haemek, which is one of Israel’s oldest and largest kibbutzim, and still exists today. Nicknamed the “Guard of the Valley”, it’s situated in northwest Israel, a 30-minute drive south of Haifa. I lived there from ages 7-11, formative years which have shaped much of who I am today. 

On the kibbutz the kids lived in “children’s houses” which were divided by age group, so my two bothers and I all lived in separate places. We slept, ate, played, showered and were taught as a group in the children’s houses; our parents lived in separate apartment four-plexes and we would visit them for a few hours each night. Microphones were set up in each room in the children’s houses and parents would take turns listening in and responding to the slightest disturbance.  

Every year, each children’s house would visit the Holocaust memorial, located on the kibbutz property during Yom Kippur, one of the Jewish high, holy days of atonement. We were asked to walk silently, and led into a courtyard with one building and three short walls. I remember the walls were made of large, rectangular stones, gray in color and a bit rough and oddly shaped. The ground was covered in cobblestone, though the entrance was covered with leaves from overgrown trees, just as at the start of Autumn. The initial cool breeze was the best thing about the visit, because soon the heat would rise and we would be subjected to what seemed like hours of information about how the Jews had suffered, first as slaves in Egypt and then in the Holocaust by the Germans. 

We were asked to think about and deeply feel the pain, misery, and sacrifice of our people; we were asked to set aside the fun times we were having in the children’s houses and consider how many people had lost their lives so that we could be somewhere safe. We were told we needn’t worry, but that we should be grateful to be living in Israel, our promised land. We were taken on the same field trip every year at Yom Kippur, and I dreaded it. I imagine all the kids felt the same, but perhaps I experienced it differently having been born in the United States. 

By 1980 I was 12 years old, and back in America, living in Ashland, Oregon. We had six acres of land and our house was next to a creek, but our home was small and I shared a tiny room with my brother. The bunk bed took up almost all the space, and I slept on the bottom; one evening as I was lying there, somewhere between waking and dreaming, I felt my body seize up and become as rigid as a plank of wood. I started to see myself being led into a crematorium and facing a row of blazing hot steel ovens, flames visible through a small window at the top of each door.  

One of the doors opened and a steel bed rolled out, the hottest fire I could imagine at the oven’s belly. I climbed in, laid down, and was rolled in. The imagined screaming woke me up. I felt what seemed like a conscious sensation of being trapped and burned alive, and I could feel the finality of death through my body. It was a completely disembodying experience, and it carved a deep wound somewhere inside. Later, after some research, I realized that burning prisoners alive was exceeding rare in Nazi concentration camps. It simply wasn't efficient. I started to wonder where such visceral ideas and feelings had come from, and why I had been so scared of Germans and Germany as a child.  

I vaguely remembered having heard fearful stories of German people from my mother and grandmother, though my mother also made jokes about Germans, putting on a comic fake accent. She died in 2003 and I inherited her books, among other things, including a kind of illustrated encyclopedia titled The Wonderful Story of the Jews, written by Jacob Gewirtz. It was published in 1971, not long before our move to Israel. The text refers to the German’s “unspeakable crimes” against the Jews, as well as the “unending ravages of war, persecution, and tyranny” they have faced; some of the illustrations are quite scary, showing buildings on fire and Jewish people menaced by gun-wielding Nazis. The book presents Israel as a place of refuge, the Kibbutzim as almost unique. 

When my parents divorced my mother was just 25, and had three boys attached at her hip. Those who knew her then say she was idealistic, practical, and brave, not given to introspection. I can easily imagine she looked to this book for solace, as a guide to living through difficult times. But I also wonder how it influenced her, and in turn how it influenced me.  

In 2008, a friend suggested I photograph Berlin. He thought the city would be a good match for my sensibilities, but I met his suggestion with trepidation and fear. I harbored many preconceived ideas about Germans and Germany, stemming from my Jewish heritage and also from growing up in Israel. I imagined Berlin as a vast, cold, unfriendly, gritty place, but at the same time, it seemed exciting and sexy somehow. Later that year I met a guy called Christian, who was visiting my Buddhist center in Portland, Oregon. He told me he lived across the street from a sister Buddhist center in Berlin, and invited me to housesit while he was travelling. 

I decided to see Berlin for myself, keen to challenge my existing ideas and also uncover reminders of the Jewish people who had lived there, until they fled or were hunted down and killed by the Nazis. I didn’t do a lot of research ahead of my arrival, I just bought a couple of travel books, a bunch of black and white film and booked a flight for when fitted around Christian. I arrived at Tegel Airport in the early morning in 2009, and Christian picked me up and drove like a wild man to his home in the Mitte district. I met his friends and roommates Brian, Suzanne, Massimo, Tanya, and Sven, and their friends Michael, Liza, Sarah, Aaron, Ulrike and Lena. I photographed them all during what came to be many stays in the city. I didn’t know I would spend the next five years reconciling my feelings and associations with Germany and the German people and writing a new narrative. 

I wandered the streets making work, attempting to walk through my own looking glass towards the now. This book is an attempt to remember, confront, and unwind my attitudes about Germans, Germany, Berlin, and my Jewish inheritance; these images are part discovery, part remembrance, and part fantasy. They’re my attempt to stand where Jewish people were rounded up and deported, to remember but also reassess. They’re an effort to confront my internal attitudes and prejudices, to look into people’s eyes and find a continuation of kindness, to be open to the happiness of contemporary life in Berlin.  

I followed the thread of the Holocaust because somehow it’s still in me, though I was born in 1967 in Tuczon, Arizona. I feel it inside, buried under the layers of my family’s fears and my childhood experiences. I imagine it’s in my kids too. Knowing that I’m a link in a chain of survivors comes with weight I can’t take lightly or cast aside. 

When we returned to the States, my mother insisted we receive a Jewish education and prepare for Bar Mitzvahs, which I did at the customary age of 13. I attended Saturday school, where I think I was expected to intuitively apply Old Testament stories to my own personal and spiritual life. This simply never happened. I think I was too young. 

Around the time of my Bar Mitzvah though, my family connected with a reform Jewish temple in our hometown in Oregon. There, I connected with what I felt to be Jewishness in the form of tradition, remembrance and honor of ancestors, openness, interconnectedness, wonder and joy, usually with the help of an acoustic guitar-led singalong. I understood the temple’s emphasis on kindness, togetherness, love and helpfulness to one another, and appreciation for intellect and creativity. Walking the streets of Berlin put me back in touch with my Jewishness, because of the history there. I felt physically and spiritually aware of my Jewish background with every step, and I wonder if my approach to this very book has been shaped by those traditions I was taught, of intellect, of creativity, and of fellow-feeling.  

In Berlin I worked alone, imagining all who had walked where I was walking, those who had taken the same route as me, going to the same places. I wondered what they looked like and what was on their minds, what they were wearing, who they were with, and how long they lived. Berlin is full of ghosts. Whenever I had the freedom to wander, I took it as a gift of prolonged, uninterrupted time for reflection. For the most part no one bothered me. I felt invisible, as if I were floating above the city, swooping down occasionally to timidly snap a photo or two.  

Once in a while, I found the courage to ask someone if I could photograph them. My approach was direct. I made one or two shots of each person, noted their name, thanked them, and kept going. My only direction was that they should look into the camera, and I always apologized for not knowing German. I found that most young people spoke to me in English anyway, and encountered very few who refused my camera. In between photographing places of pain, I would visit my friends and make intimate photographs of them, usually in repose. It was a strange mix of death and life, pain and pleasure; life, death, and giving life again. There was a sense of youth, freedom and joy I felt in Berlin and found a way to do that with casual, affectionate pictures of my new friends. 

The photographs are organized geographically from West to East, a metaphorical walk in the direction of the rising sun but also into my own past. This book is not a document, it is a dream within a dream within another dream. Berlin is immense, there was no way I could cast a wide enough net to what it’s like; instead I have painted a picture of then and now, pain and pleasure, some people who died long ago, those who are living and young, all from my own perspective. The photographs in the back of the book are a kind of tone poem; U-Bahn station ruin, Goodbye Berlin, Goodbye Liza, Goodbye Brian, A dog jumps in the woods, I am listening and rising, Union and rising again. 

Jason Langer, 2021

Berlin: A Scarred City

 “Don’t trust the green spaces.” I’m often reminded of these so fitting words from East Berlin essayist Heinz Knobloch. Their universality applies to all places in this world. And they’re so true. But they enter my head above all when I’m walking, driving, and strolling through Berlin. Berlin, the city where I grew up; the city where I’ve lived since childhood. This scarred city, where world history is perceptible on practically every corner, where you can sense that plenty of earth-shattering things have originated here—from the good things to the abysmally dark ones. 

The past’s long shadows, they loom over the here and now in this city in such varying ways, whether it’s on a dedicated city tour or completely by the way, “en passant,”—and then there’s personally of course, in each families’ stories, in the lives of all. 

Grief, escape, pain, violence, expulsion—these exact experiences exist in surely every family, it’s true. What does not, however, is the thought of being exterminated. The thought remains incomprehensible to this day, and it asks so much of you. And you probably do feel something like an “eternal nevertheless” when you decide to live as a Jewish person in Germany. After all, Hitler did not succeed! But this “eternal nevertheless,” it has its price—because the roads are paved with so much association, with “too many Geister,” as one Jewish American woman once told me when visiting Germany for the first time. Yes, she used the German word for “ghosts” despite her English. That works, I think—because whenever I peddle past the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof I always remember that this was the train station where my Berlin-raised grandmother Alice saw her parents for the last time in 1938 before fleeing to Palestine as a teenager. Meanwhile her parents thought they were too old to be persecuted by Hitler. They were going to visit relatives in Poland and see what time would bring. Everything would be fine! They wrote heartbreaking letters to Alice in Palestine for a few more years—but in 1941 their correspondence broke off. No more news from Lwóv. They were murdered somewhere in the forests near Lwóv during one of the many mass shootings there. How did my beloved big-hearted granny live with such pain?

Or when I’m waiting for the commuter train near my home and I see the end-of-the-line signage saying: Wannsee, and Oranienburg. Aha, I think every time: Wannsee—that’s where that famous conference about the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” took place. There, fifteen high-ranking National Socialists decided how to organize the mass murder of European Jews using cryptic and bureaucratic Nazi-Speak—and breakfasted afterward at that idyllic spot on Wannsee Lake. That’s what the meeting minutes say. And Oranienburg: the concentration camp Sachsenhausen is located there. Wonder what Oranienburgers thought of that?

Right around the corner from my building, there’s a pharmacy. At the exit I can’t miss the historic moniker hanging above the entrance: Apotheke am Sportpalast (Pharmacy at Sportpalast). For good reason, too: located right across from this pharmacy was the famous Sportpalast where Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels gave his famous speech in 1943 that asked, “Do you want total war?” To wild cheering. There are newer buildings here today, the so-called Pallasseum block, but they weren’t able to blow up the huge bunker below so they built the newer buildings around and over the stony colossus. 

A few meters further, adorned colonnades adorn a green space—right beyond that there’s the Court of Justice where the Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court) met from August 1944 to January 1945 and in doing so held the infamous show trials that Roland Freisler led against those involved in the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944. I only reluctantly go into the park area laid out around the building. Those aren’t the kind of thoughts you need when doing everyday things, when living your life.

Striped pajamas don’t make it into my home; yellow is a difficult color—I can’t bear wearing it. At least not “that” yellow. The Jewish Star one. 

Grief, escape, pain, violence, expulsion. Such issues are sure to be found in every family if you start asking questions, and investigating.

In Jewish families that survived the Shoah, the consequences of surviving are far more present, even today. Even when what family members actually experienced has been kept silent. Out of shame, out of profound pain, out of a desire to keep going, to live. 

As a Jew, it’s tough for you to distance yourself from your ancestors’ stories of survival. Because of this fact of life, Berlin is constantly providing you with a projection screen, a mirror. 

It is what it is; it was what it was—that’s what we deal with. Heirlooms from ancestors are almost nonexistent. There are no pieces you can reference to reflect on your family history. They’ve disappeared due to expulsion and murder. If you’re lucky, there are stories at least. Maybe some other family is today in possession of some supposed heirloom or another, but who really knows?! No matter how the things reached them. Amid the turmoil of war, Jewish-owned household goods were sold off in the so-called “Jewish auctions,” these auctions sometimes even taking place in the deportees’ own newly vacated apartments. Or some neighbor got their hands on a Jewish neighbors’ belongings when they “disappeared.” Or, or, or . . . who even knows? I can only wonder what could be found in my own neighbor’s home.

One thing’s certain: I often get a gloomy feeling when I stroll through Berlin’s flea markets. Where did all these things come from? Who did they once belong to? Whose hands did they pass through until eventually ending up here? Stolen things, stolen lives. Who got rich off these things? How many insurance policies passed through the chimneys of the Auschwitz crematories and were never “reimbursed”? Who all profited from the extermination? 

I remember times from my youth when I was with my best girlfriend at her grandfather’s house. He was happy and proud to show us photos of him in a German army hospital on the Eastern Front. My friend was ashamed. Me as well. Or being a kid when our neighbors, an elderly married couple, both old fogeys to my young eyes and always so serious and bitter, one time came up to me outside the building I lived in as a kid and whispered to me in a harsh tone, “Tell your parents, we weren’t Nazis!” I was scared of the Frankes. They never did like kids. 

“Too many Geister.” If all these buildings could talk, the American lady had said to me back then, some probably had a few things to tell . . . like the building where I happen to live now in Berlin:

My building once belonged to two Jewish brothers, as I learned on accident. They’d owned a number of buildings in Berlin before the war. During the war, the brothers escaped to England. They asked their building’s maid to collect their rental earnings and—illicitly so—send the money to them in exile. Meanwhile this maid was having an affair with the local Nazi Gauleiter, and when the war was nearing its end, the building was simply gifted to the young woman. Not from the brothers somehow, but from the Gauleiter who was assuming the Jews wouldn’t be showing up again anyway. He was proved right. Frau Eckart was now the proud owner of a whole apartment building that she owned into old age—but then a guilty conscience seized the devout Catholic when she was well advanced in years, this being some point in the 1990s, and she made a donation to the Jewish Community of Berlin. 

Incidentally, the daughter of one of the building-owning brothers, Liane Berkowitz, had remained in Berlin during the war and joined the resistance. She was active in the so-called “Red Orchestra,” and was arrested for the poster campaign the resistance group used to protest the “Soviet Paradise” exhibition created by the Reich Propaganda Office of the NSDAP. On the evening of May 17, 1942, Liane Berkowitz had pasted up about 100 stickers between Kurfürstendamm and Uhlandstrasse. The stickers read: “Permanent Exhibition . . . The Nazi Paradise . . . War, Hunger, Lies, Gestapo . . . How Much Longer?”

Liane Berkowitz was executed in Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison on August 5, 1943. Since she was pregnant when arrested, she was allowed to give birth to her child while still in custody, before her sentence was carried out. The haunting and shockingly ferocious letters she wrote while in prison, waiting for the birth of her child and knowing that her life would end soon after, can be read today in the impressive exhibition “We Were Neighbors” at the city hall for Berlin’s Schöneberg borough. They send a cold shiver down my spine every time.

Liane Berkowitz had passed in and out of our apartment building before the war. I often think of her story when I unlock the front door. This is how close that history, beyond our family’s own, can sometimes touch us. In this city, in this Berlin. 

It’s essential to locate all these stories inside yourself, to give them a place, to assign them a place. You can’t grapple with such thoughts all day and night without completely losing it. That doesn’t seem healthy to me; that doesn’t do the soul any good in the long run. But there come these moments when these things re-emerge so concretely, even sometimes so unexpectedly. It takes strength. It’s essential to maintain an inner composure or you’ll completely crack from the history and the stories.

The long shadows of the past are also reflected in the haunting black-and-white images from photographer Jason Langer. Only upon closer inspection do many of them reveal the period in which they were taken: His sharp eye reveals the broken, the evidence, the scarred, the clash of eras, and the earth-shattering. The voids and scars covered over also become clear, voids that are filled anew: with life, with youth culture, with everyday life, with those things attractively unfinished. Typical Berlin. Here the derelict, the scar, is used as a platform for new spaces of a subculture, one that’s maybe even healed to a certain extent.

What today is seen as a silent witness gets its ferocity mainly from knowing what happened here. Only in the moment of knowing can the abyss and the extent of it be sensed. Not understood, no, but sensed . . . What remains from there? Stories. And many questions.

Shelly Kupferberg, Translated by Steve Anderson, 2021

Berlin, Berlin—Jason Langer’s Ode to the Grossstadt

The city of Heinrich Zille, Alfred Doeblin, Joseph Roth, and Marlene Dietrich—not to mention the decadent Weimar years, made famous in American popular culture by the musical, Cabaret, an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s famous novel Good-bye to Berlin-- became that of Lou Reed, and David Bowie, Nina Hagen, among many chroniclers of its cultural world. For much of the breadth of the 20th century, Berlin has fascinated and appalled at the same time. As painting gave way to photography and the movies, during the 20th century the city of Ernst Ludwig Kirschner and George Grosz became the city of Hannah Hoech and Martin Munkasci. It was then and is now the subject par excellence for photography. 

Always in flux, Berlin is as the journalist Karl Scheffler put it, a "city condemned to becoming and never to being." 

Berlin, itself, is indeed a sort of façade both in name and deed. Even that well-beloved town symbol, the bear, has nothing to do with the original place that was built on the confluence of the rivers Spree and Havel. No. Berlin, built on a swamp, took its name from the old Slavic word, birl, or swamp. This could also help explain the loss of the billions of Euros in building projects, etc.: the money just sank into the water. And so, as one scrunches one’s way across the sandy, stony streets, one notices at first glance that the city is truly a complex of castles built on sand.  

More so than with other places with a long and complicated history, Berlin’s buildings and street fronts have always tried to put specific faces on its architecture and the facades of its buildings.  

The massivity of the Nazi –era architecture of Speer and Co.-- tarted up with neo-classical details: a wreath here, a frieze or eagle there—attempted to concretize and legitimate Hitler’s regime. The post-war reconstruction wrought by the occupying powers and subsequent East and West German governments compounded and refracted Berlin’s public face still further because the divided Berlin was always already confronting itself. 

During the Cold War, the separation created by the Wall and the need to present to the other side the most attractive and strongest image each half reflected a true split personality in the buildings of the city. Two of the highest buildings, the Fernsehturm in the East and the Axel Springer Verlag skyscraper in the West, both not surprisingly media-centered buildings responsible for broadcasting in electronic and print media the political and commercial images of the opposing systems, could be seen, weather permitting, almost everywhere in the divided city. They were made explicitly to be seen by the other side. This double-vision gave Berlin the realized psychological schizophrenia that lives on in the façades of the city’s public spaces and the office windows and the storefronts. 

It is a place that the American writer William Faulkner would see in the same words as he referred to the “God-haunted South” of the post- Civil War epoch of the United States where “The past is not dead. It is not even past.” Everywhere one turns one sees, is confronted with, is reminded of, the things that have gone on throughout its history. and, for example, through the observations of the famous “Stolpersteine” or “Stumbling Stones” of the artist-historian Gunter Demning whose brass coated paving stones memorialize those, including entire families, whom the Nazis forcibly deported and all too often exterminated, in the sidewalks in front of the houses where they lived. These inconspicuous memorials are part of modern Berlin and more than any of the more photogenic monuments in Berlin are reminders of those whose lives were lived in Berlin and whose lives were deliberately and systematically taken from them. These “Stolpersteine” have become to me a talisman of a history the Nazis tried to erase. They also become yet another facet of the many historical layers or façades of Berlin that continue to be present in this haunted, scarred, recovering city. 

Here in this all round now, the pedestrian, flaneur, photographer, that thief of images, looks in at the world presented and finds himself caught by his very glance, betrayed by his fleeting reflection. The crime: imagining in the big city the world at once within and without, complete in a moment and caught in the tain of the mirrored glass as though on a sheet of film.  

For a photographer Berlin is the perfect subject. The camera fixes change, if only for a moment, at 1/125 second. It reminds one, as Roland Barthes noted, of what has passed and of what is to pass. But as we shall later see in Jason Langer’s selected vignettes, there is something more going on than seemingly randomly chosen moments from the everyday. 

Berlin, like all great cities, has been a magnet for seekers and searchers and people trying to make new lives. Not for nothing was the Hollywood of Europe, Babelsberg, the first and still largest European film studio, created in 1912. With its intense build up from the years 1870 through the early 1930s, Berlin became the cultural hub of Europe if not the world, especially during the post-WWI Weimar Era.  

Two movies especially, Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin- Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt from 1927 and Menschen am Sonntag from 1930 by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, with a story by Billy Wilder, pay homage with great flair and honest charm to the lives of normal people living and loving in the Weimar years. These films, among the finest examples of cinema verité, celebrate the lust for life and feeling of endless possibility that the Berlin metropolis made famous. Sadly, this epoch was to be short-lived. 

With the coming of the Nazis in 1933 this cosmopolitan, multicultural mélange, most recently celebrated in the ongoing series Babylon Berlin, came crashing down, and with it, began the Second World War and the destruction of Jewish society in Europe. 

Yet both Berlin itself and Jewish life in Berlin have, however, survived the atrocities of the Holocaust and the shattered ruins left in the wake of the bombings and tank battles that finally crushed the Nazi regime in 1945. 

With the passing of time, of war and division and finally reunification, the city has changed immensely, but even as the layers of architecture have been built up, destroyed, and replaced, Berlin is still that “cesspool and paradise” it was a century ago. 

Still, though, there are traces of the past and signs of an even more vibrant future everywhere on looks in this scarred metropolis. 

I must confess that I am a history freak and one who is fascinated with big cities and how they have evolved, lurching from epoch to epoch, for better and for worse. Baltimore, New York, San Francisco, and Budapest have been stations on my path. I like cities the same way as many other people who come to them. They are places to find work, to find oneself, to participate in something bigger than oneself and to feel that one is a player on the grand stage of life’s great theatre of being. 

For writers and artists, especially photographers, Berlin at the turn of the 21st century has something of the limitless sense of possibility of all great cities in their boom times, yet, unlike in almost all other cities, the past is always present. This makes for especially haunted experiences and for dreams both fantastic and nightmares most deep. 

About that haunting feeling: for me as for Jason Langer, Berlin evokes the ghosts of the past even as it seems to be a portal to a lively and diverse future. The signs of Prussian greatness gave way both to the Nazi dictatorship enforced by the Geheime Staatspolizei or Gestapo and to the German Democratic Republic whose “real existing socialism” was maintained by the Ministry for State Security or Ministerium fuer Staatssicherheit gave rise to another equally feared acronym, Stasi. Both regimes used similar methods of spying on their own citizens, and as one system was replaced after the end of the Second World War, some of the same buildings such as those in the northern suburbs of Hoehenschoenhausen and Sachsenhausen were used by Gestapo and Stasi alike to confine and torture those whom they considered “enemies of the state.” 

Needless to say, both regimes perfected a parody of “German efficiency” in the most brutally bureaucratic form. Depicted in Langer’s evocative photographs is the House of the Wannsee Conference where in 1941 the Nazis planned the “Final Solution” to eliminate the Jewish populations under Nazi control especially in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The evil banality of deadly bureaucracy is also to be seen in his images from the Stasi archive with its extraordinary collection of files totaling some 111 kilometers of documents many of which are held in Berlin and represent the work of thousands of “informale Mitarbeiter””, short “IM’ or “unofficial collaborators, i.e., citizens who spied upon their fellow citizen and family members. 

Even today, German bureaucracy and authority figures evoke an almost Kafka-esque fear in me even if the bad old days are long past. It manifests itself whenever I go to renew my papers or even pass through a demonstration… 

And yet, Berlin for me as for Langer, and for countless others—by 2020 some 40% of Berliners were not born in Berlin and almost 25% of the nearly four million residents are non-German immigrants-- has been the place for self-exploration, for work, and for the sheer joy of meeting new people and experiencing new relationships. 

It is a personal search for self and for the experiences that build the self and as such forms a sort of modern Bildungsroman told through images as Langer so ably demonstrates. Not for nothing does the above introductory excerpt from David Bowie’s epic song cycle, Station to Station, make sense for this essay because, like Langer as for myself, Bowie, after a series of intermediate stations of his own and the trying out and discarding personae, ended up in Berlin where he experienced one of the most artistically fruitful periods of his life that brought forth his “Berlin Trilogy” that consisted of the albums Low, Heroes, and Lodger. 

For me as for Langer, the constant juxtapositions of history and emotions have enabled the creation of series of writings and photographs that doubly reflect our own experience of the discordant symphony that “Grossstadt Berlin” produces with every living breath and pace of foot or pedal of bike or tram ride for that matter. It is a self-contradicting history of reality, received memories, of fantasies and of aspirations—but then so is life. 

Jason Langer’s fascinating portrait of Berlin is more of an inward portrait that expresses through eloquent black and white imagery that touches the symphonic notes and registers of the “Grossstadt” and those of his personal itinerary across it in his depictions of his own fears, fantasies, and experiences in the big city. It is a compiled emotional chronicle of several extended visits with his own inimitable personal relationships with friends and places both fantastic and all too real across spaces temporal and emotional as well as geographic. 

Arranged as a journey departing from West to East, “towards the rising sun” as he has elsewhere described, his darkly ambiguous images reflect a period of his own search for enlightenment. 

Bill Kouwenhoven, 2021

Figures M: Photographs 2003 – 2013

This carefully chosen collection of 30 photographs represents a span of ten years, from 2003 to 2013, a period in which Jason Langer moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon. All of the models included here answered an ad posted on Craigslist seeking men comfortable being photographed among their own possessions in their own homes.

Langer’s depiction of the male nude shows a continuity with his earliest photographic studies. Invariably, his models are depicted alone. They often emerge out of shadow, exuding an air of quiet contemplation, perhaps a bit of danger. Their forms are shorn of any names or titles. But if in his earliest images Langer reveals a lack of interest in the identity of his subjects, preferring idealized silhouettes that evoke an “Everyman,” in this collection he self-consciously poses the question of whether it’s possible to puncture the veil of the ego when looking at a face.

“As a Buddhist of many years, I know that the ego is an illusion,” says Langer. “I wanted to see if it’s still possible to think about a universal person while looking into a man’s eyes.” Among the techniques he uses to explore this idea are the close cropping of the body, various degrees of soft-focus blur, in addition to the rich use of shadow. The spectator, it seems, is invited to fill in the missing details with their own imagination.

If there is a tension between the Buddhist view of the self and the visual pleasure derived from looking at the nude figure, it may also find expression here in the subversion of expectations for the male form. Langer roots his images in the classical tradition of representing the male form, selecting “slim or athletic” bodies, that in some other contexts might stand in for the heroes and gods of myth and legend, a classicizing impulse that finds its way into a small detail in one of the images; a round vase with dancing nymphs. But instead of capturing his models in moments of action or authority, he finds them in repose – reclining on a sofa, gazing out a window, balancing against a wall, slouched on the floor. These men are circumscribed by the private sphere of home and garden. “Curiously, my approach turned out to be to photograph them in typically feminine ways,” says Langer.

“There is an element of risk when you invite a stranger into your home,” he admits. “The images collected here testify to my own wish to keep a respectful distance. They recognize the precariousness of desire and the potential for violence that’s always lurking outside the frame. I was not sure whether some of these men were hoping for sex by answering my ad. Looking at the project a few years after the images were made I can feel that possibility.  

John Hill, 2020

Wrestling with the Impossible

An exquisite, relentless tension is barely contained within the borders of Jason Langer’s photographs. This tension is skillfully amplified by composition, evocative subject matter, and a sophisticated printing style. Through these satisfying elements Langer urges us to embrace the potent mix of pleasure and anxiety that tension offers. His images court and quickly seduce us with familiar subject matter made popular in the early twentieth century—the lone pedestrian passing almost unnoticed through a dark city, the surreal shop window full of mannequins or masks. Yet, photographs so traditional in subject and evocative of past eras must offer us more than the pull of nostalgia to remain relevant today. Embodied in Langer’s imagery is a subtle yet enticing undercurrent fueled by the bond between the photographer’s personal philosophy and the essence of his chosen medium. This undercurrent represents the universal struggle to attain permanence, the drive to find something to hold onto, in our fleeting world. 

Langer regularly and with conviction speaks of photography and Buddhism in the same breath. His search for universal meaning is evident in his imagery, and central to his being is his desire to follow the ways of the Buddha, to release himself from the trappings of modern society and to embrace impermanence, one of the Three Marks of Existence. According to Buddhist teachings, the ability to liberate oneself from desire and possessions is necessary to achieve enlightenment. It is therefore paradoxical that Langer’s 2013 publication of photographs is titled Possession. Curiously, the strength of his conviction in the Buddhist path is filtered through photography, a medium which attempts to make the transitory permanent.

During the mid-nineteenth century, as the new process of photography gained prominence as a spectacular and increasingly accessible means of recording the visible world, photographers made lifelike portraits that sitters gave to their loved ones; that police placed on broadsides to describe the wanted and used as records for investigation; and that physicians used to consult when studying illness or to chart the effects of trauma on the body. Landscape photographers created documents used in court as evidence in property lawsuits and as proof of the many resources—minerals, forests, waterways—to be harvested in the American West.  Indeed, in 1859, physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., described the photograph as a “mirror with a memory.” The photograph, striving for perpetuity, was a means to make permanent a person, a landscape, or an event.

Today, photographers and consumers of the medium alike praise photography’s ability to capture a tiny percentage of the millions of fleeting instants that make up a lifetime. Henri Cartier-Bresson called his many slivers of time “decisive moments”—the exact instants when the harmony between humanity and environment is made manifest in visually poetic arabesques and to this day transcend the march of time. How, then, does someone like Langer, who believes so strongly in the spiritual benefits of impermanence and the transcendent release of possessions, also traffic in the permanent nature of photography? 

Lacking the key to Langer’s psyche or soul, I cannot answer this question. But I do know that these polarities do not indicate contradiction. They instead signal a willingness to embrace the complexities of the human condition. Consider the pacing of this book: It begins with both subtle and overt symbols of death—the cemetery, the skull, the eviscerated body. All are static. Subsequent photographs pull us toward life through purposeful physical motion, whether singing or striding or smoking. Finally, the revelation of the human form, stripped of the social trappings of clothing, suggests humanity’s potential and power and fragility. Langer pushes us, through the beauty of well-crafted imagery, to tangle with the tension that builds between life and death, and between an artist and his medium.

Langer’s oeuvre, honed over many years, belies not only photographic skill but also the artist’s struggle with concepts that we all must confront day after day. He continues to pull together dark and light, male and female, enlightened and naïve, for his own benefit as well as for ours. His very physical subjects and the physical negatives, prints, and books he creates seem permanent, and we may possess them for a time. As we seek meaning and pleasure in his photographs, Langer’s work will always remind us that embracing the tension and mystery of the human condition is a well-deserved reward for wrestling with the impossible, just as he himself does each day.

Julia Dolan, 2013

Prince of Darkness: The Photographs of Jason Langer

In my experience, when the walls are closing in and the ground is shifting beneath your feet, it is good to have a man like Jason Langer around. This was made very clear to me at precisely 5.04pm on October 17th, 1989 in my tiny studio apartment in San Francisco. As Jason desperately held onto a large bouncing bookcase with one hand, and with the other, juggled five freshly printed 16x20 Ruth Bernhard “In the Box Horizontal” prints, which were attempting to fly across the room, I was running to the shelter of a doorframe clutching my four year old daughter Olivia, busily trying to reassure her that it was actually quite fun to watch cups and saucers jump out of cabinets and break on the ground. The Loma Prieta earthquake only lasted 15 seconds although it seemed much longer, and in the midst of that chaos, Jason seemed to maintain an air of complete calm, almost detachment, watching events from a different space. He was in his element. It was a defining moment for me and helped me to see a side of Jason that he usually kept under lock and key.

After an ongoing correspondence, Jason first came to work for me in 1989 when he had completed his photography studies in Eugene, Oregon. A hard worker and quick learner he was an excellent assistant and I was fortunate to benefit from his services for three years. He was, and still is, passionate about music and I would often hear jazz from the 1940's and 1950's in the background as he quietly got on with the day’s tasks. He introduced me to Miles Davis, who was nicknamed the "Prince of Darkness" for his ability, like the Greek God Hermes, to guide listeners to the underworld and bring them dreams.  Jason was always something of an odd bird, following his personal solitary path and listening to his deep inner voices. The music obviously had some special resonance for him and the photographs in this book clearly reveal why. 

There is an unsettling sense inherent in many of Jason’s photographs and when asked about it he responded  “I feel haunted by impermanence and a search for meaning in this life. This is very real to me.” It is no wonder that he has been a disciplined practitioner of Buddhism for the last 10 years. The search for meaning in life is one of Jason’s fundamental qualities. It is an admirable goal, and a heavy load for him to carry. His nocturnal images seem to bring us to the edge of danger, but he stays one step short and instead walks us down a lamp-lit street where we might witness a distinctive nighttime moment or rendezvous with a secret partner.  Jason takes us on a journey, which could be frightening; alone, in the dark, but he has infused his work with poetic sensibility and intrigue. His subjectivity and privateness seem to harken back to the symbolist photographers like Alvin Langdon Coburn and early Steichen.  The beauty and romanticism lure us in, ask questions, and probe our psyche. I get the feeling that he finds adventure exploring a side of the world that most of us would choose to avoid. It is a world of shadows and portents, where our intrepid protagonist openly faces and challenges the powers of the night. The word “edgy” comes to mind. It is comforting to think we are control, but these pictures suggest we are not. Sometimes I have wondered if Jason is a voyeur in this world, or an active participant? Whether he has made a choice, or whether the choice was made for him? He doesn’t say.  In any case, fear is often the physical manifestation of our fertile imaginations, about what could happen next. What if? Jason presents us with scenarios, which make us look inside ourselves and ask those same questions. It can be a little unnerving. We all make our own choices and decisions. In this book we can choose to travel with him as he guides us to our own underworld, or we can be content to look over his shoulder. Either way, these photographs are a pleasure to look at and remind us of the place within ourselves that is solitary, private and has a touch of fearlessness and yearning. The assistant has become a master and I am thrilled for him.

Michael Kenna, 2006

Erika Photographs 1998 - 2013

I met Erika in 1998 through a mutual friend, the actor/ writer/ director Matt Ross. I was visiting Matt in New York and mentioned to him that I was interested in photographing women. Until then I had only made personal photographs of my male friends. Mattsuggested I meet his friend Erika whom he first knew as an undergrad at the University of Washington. They had both moved to New York City to pursue acting careers. Erika was enthusiastic about making some pictures with me and suggested we meet the following day.

 Upon meeting her, I was immediately drawn to Erika. Matt left us alone and Erika and I began making pictures. We commenced in a way that would be our collaborative method for the next 15 years. The photographs collected in this box are an amalgam of what we each brought to the photo session on that day. The near yearly changing locations, the changing light, various articles of clothing Erika had collected earlier the previous months; and most critically, our shifting and maturing stages of life which contributed heavily to the variety you see in the final images. The second-to-last time I saw Erika she was eight months pregnant. In our final photos she was bonding with her six-month old.

We had both been through many personal changes during the timespan of these pictures, but the initial creative connection Erika and I shared remained strong and consistent throughout. I felt my experiment in photographing women was immediately successful. Erika and I seemed to have the same sensibility in making dynamic and personal images. It helped that Erika was used to being seen, being on stage and was a photographer herself. Her Williamsburg flat had a curious aura about it. The light was dim and soft, coming in as reflections from other buildings. Erika’s clothing, furniture and décor were all teeming with character – choice vintage. All I knew about Erika at the time was that she was making a living as a producer and actor in avant-garde theater and that her presence enchanted me and my camera.

I discovered a lot about myself through photographing Erika. My previous photographs were primarily about reconnecting with my father. My images depicted anonymous men wandering dark city streets on an undefined mission. After making enough of these images I had a suspicion that something was missing in my artistic and personal development and that perhaps I should stop pursuing the symbolic male and let him go. Being a longtime believer in Carl Jung’s theory of the inner masculine and feminine aspects of each of us - our respective animus and anima - photographing Erika helped me connect with my inner feminine. My images began to reflect my changing curiosity and focus and brought about different qualities into my photographs.

I became interested in subtle variations in light. I sought more visual complexity and texture in my images. Each photo session exhibited a distinct mood. At first, I was intimidated at the idea of photographing the female form. After photographing Erika, I started a series of female nudes and semi-nudes, opening myself up to a variety of imagery with various women inviting me into their homes to make pictures. Being receptive to input from those whom I was photographing was a major change in my picture-making. I realized I had a tendency to foist my idea onto my subject. Photographing Erika helped me recognize the value of others’ suggestions and to creativity and space itself. In Buddhist philosophy the feminine is often likened to space. Photographing Erika allowed me to better appreciate more of what happens in space in its entirety. Photographing Erika has also given me insight into how a person changes over time and place; body and perspective. Erika quickly became not only my muse and inspiration, she became my friend and colleague and helped me be a more well-rounded and understanding person.

In this presentation of the photographs from the Erika sessions it seems natural to include her words, as the process of making the images always included stimulating conversation about art, place, light and shadow and what was happening in our respective lives. The text came from a series of interviews I made with Erika in 2019. He words are partly captions to the photographs and partly her thoughts and reminiscences of the places she’s lived, her relationships and her thoughts on art and life. I hope the viewer enjoys the photographs in a wider context by appreciating not just the way Erika looks, but also by reading her insightful ideas about her creative process. I also hope you take from the text a sense of Erika’s resilience and insistence on living life creatively and positively.

In these photographs the viewer is partly seeing Erika as a person and partly seeing her many masks and personas. Each one is a manifestation of her multifaceted nature. Throughout the years Erika directed me as much as I directed her. We would each be interested equally in ideas, mannerisms, light and shadow. And throughout our collaborative partnership we agreed to create imagery that is open–ended and interpretive, so that each viewer can inject imaginary stories and ideas in between what we brought. I encourage you to do so.

This box of photographs is designed so that is does not simply sit on a shelf with other books. It is designed to be left out in the open. It beckons to be perused like a box of snapshots, complete with a jolt of curiosity and imagination. The prints are loose so that they may be framed and put on a wall or shelf if desired. I imagine collectors of this box to frame one or two prints and place them in a couple places in the house, as if Erika is a distant relative – or perhaps a mysteriousstranger who persists in asking questions any time her face is invoked. The prints should be touched, their edges roughed-up over time. Ideally, the photographs are to be held closely.

 Jason Langer, 2019

Hunter of Miracles

In the fall of 2004, Jason Langer flew to Paris hunting for miracles. A friend had told him about a collection of rare medical specimens stored somewhere in the Faculté de Médecine, and Jason wanted to see them. One afternoon around five o’ clock as students were leaving for the day, he waited until the lights flicked off behind a door inscribed with the names Delmas-Orfila-Rouvière. With the door left unlocked, Jason walked right in, camera at his side. For someone with a taste for the macabre, what came next can only be described as a treasure trove, a jackpot. Cabinet after cabinet of skeletons lined with skulls; a whole wall of severed hands, another of severed feet; wet reptiles and birds under glass; an unborn human fetus; cross sections of brains and bowels; casts of livers, gizzards, and deformities of all kinds. But to describe the pictures he took, as the last hour of daylight seeped out of the rooms, Jason chooses the word “miracle”. 

More than a month went by before he developed the film back home. Among the pictures from this trip is one of a 19th-century anatomical model: a boy tucked inside a cloth lined drawer, chest and abdomen laid open like a book. Legs gently cross at the ankle, arms lie relaxed at his sides. His skin appears smooth and supple. Fine features and a peaceful expression preside over the spilled secret of his insides. “I hunt with symbols in my pocket,” says Jason matter-of-factly, with a half-smile. He goes on to explain:

I’m a hunter, not a farmer of images. I have a general sense of what I’m looking for – images that represent the passage of time, of death, the mystery of life – but every time I make a picture it feels like a miracle because I never know exactly what I’m going to find. I think it was the Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain who coined the phrase hunter of miracles, and for him this is what it meant to make pictures. I feel the same way. This is where the magic occurs – in not knowing what we’ll find, in leaving ourselves open to a surprise, to learning something new.

In the case of his escapade in the Faculté de Médecine, Jason’s images are all the more miraculous for the fact that the eighth-floor museum he found is now closed. It closed, in fact, just a few months after his visit, with all its exhibits moving into indefinite storage.

Evoking the style of an earlier age of photography – epitomized by names like Stiegliz, Brassai, Brandt, and DeCarava – Jason’s carefully crafted images, rich with lush, black tones, exude an air of timelessness.  His photography appears oblivious to many of the popular trends of the last several decades – not only social realism, whose artistic roots extend back to the 19th century, but in particular the staged tableau and the so-called “deadpan” or “New Objectivity” aesthetic. While the central artistic act in much contemporary photography occurs long before the camera is ever touched by the photographer, Jason’s images return us to a place where what happens in front of the lens is unanticipated and distinctly photographic.  Neither directing the placement or look of his subjects, nor complacent to capture them in the banal light of the everyday, Jason searches out the cracks in ordinary reality in order to expose the mystery and wonder of having a body and of finding our place in the world.

From his earliest photographs Jason’s interest in what he calls “the darker recesses of the mind” is on display. The solitary kid riding his bike around Ashland, Oregon, taking pictures with a Walkman around his neck is still with Jason today. One need only admire the black and white photos of old objects he made at age 12 – rusted coffee cans and dilapidated barns shimmer with spooky significance as we imagine the lives of the people to whom they belong, and the inevitability of death and decay. As a young teenager, he developed his first of countless night photographs – taken in a cemetery, no less – using a Minolta 35mm camera and a darkroom set from an old Spiegel catalog. 

Raised on an after-school diet of films like The Third Man, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Caligari, Frankenstein, and Strangers on a Train, Jason cultivated an appreciation early on for the storytelling power of black and white imagery. Here was a world of forms pared down to their essence, and characters who stood for more than themselves. One shadowy figure that would follow Langer well into his early thirties was the loner male hero characteristically played by Humphrey Bogart. He appears throughout Jason’s work – a fedora and trench coat in silhouette, a curl of smoke in the air, tracks on a rain swept street.

Jason’s decision to pursue photography as a profession occurred in, of all places, a poetry class at the University of Oregon. He recalls reading Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. In Keats, he found a kindred spirit and an articulation of something which at the time he sensed but couldn’t utter: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.” Like Keats’ meditative poet, Jason holds to a view of art as a liberator of the imagination and a portal to spiritual truths. This poem, in particular, can serve as an important touchstone for understanding Jason’s proclivities, as well as his style. When he peers into the eyes of a Victorian doll or the painted face of a religious icon, or when he gazes upward at the gaudy midcentury marquees in Times Square, Keats’ Grecian Urn flickers dimly in the background like a ghost from the past. Among other things, Keats emboldened Jason to trust his natural instincts. He served as an example that it was possible, noble even, to be a melancholy artist staring into the face of death and the abyss of time. Equally appealing to Jason, though less fashionable in this unromantic age, was the notion expressed by Keats’ poet in a moment of prosopopoeia: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. 

Jason eventually graduated with a degree in photography, moving on to become an apprentice and printer for some of the Bay Area’s most renowned photographers including Ruth Bernhard, Arthur Tress, and Michael Kenna, who became a lifelong mentor and friend. During this time in San Francisco Jason learned how to pay the bills as an artist, while continuing to hone his own voice. His fine art photography in the early 90s gravitated toward portraits of things with an eye for the incongruent and the absurd. His sense of humor is evident in the faces he captures in odd places whether levitating on a wall under the Bay Bridge, turned sideways in the back of a pickup truck, or grinning on a freakishly large jack-o-lantern.

 His big break came in 1994 when he visited New York for the first time. In his own words he was “a small town boy in the big city”, and yet the experience felt like a “homecoming”, as though he had lived there before. Thus began one of the most productive periods in his career, a period which resulted in his first monograph, Secret City. New York’s historic landmarks and nattily dressed denizens offered the perfect playground for Jason’s time-traveling eye. Trips to Paris and New Orleans followed, and together the three cities congealed as one to mirror the artist behind the lens.

Walking the nocturnal streets in one of Jason’s photographs we might be in America or Europe – it is often hard to know – but we feel as if we have been there before.  Observing the meticulously tied bow of a waitress or the starched white shirt of a black porter we are ineluctably drawn into our own memories, our own imaginations. These faceless images could just as easily have been taken 50 or 60 years ago. Has anything changed since then? Who are these individuals? We will never know, and the effect is a nostalgic mix of the comforting and the creepy. 

Like the surrealists of the 20s and 30s, Jason possesses a knack for picturing the subconscious mind, for absorbing the viewer in a dream world where almost anything seems possible.  But unlike his predecessors, Jason’s surreal gesture is performed without recourse to such photographic tricks as the double exposure, combination printing, solarization, rotation, or other similar distortions.  The surreal element in a Langer photograph is achieved in the representation of a subject that seems to oscillate in the mind as if a déjà vu – simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, animate and inanimate, human and alien. 

The anatomical model he found in the Faculté de Médecine is one of many human surreal doubles in Jason’s Kunstkammer. Puppets, robots, mannequins, statues, masks, wax models appear everywhere.  Often these subjects feel more lifelike and individualized than their human counterparts.  His second monograph, Possession, collects more than a half dozen portraits of these objects, scattered among his other obsessions: the long corridor evoking the end of life, the mysterious solitary man, and the femme fatale. Together these obsessions conjure a world reminiscent of film noir.

Film noir typically tells the story of an investigation into a crime. Just so, in Jason’s parallel universe the possibility of foul play lurks just outside the camera’s frame, fortified by our imaginations. Sexy images of women spied in red light districts, reflected in the mirror of their boudoir, lying naked in a hotel in the early morning light – or just as often rendered in pieces: black stockings and high heel shoes, a bob wig, a torso undressed – recur throughout Jason’s oeuvre.  These shadowy, nameless women are creatures of fantasy and dreams; they seem simultaneously to entice and distance the viewer in scenes imbued with a relaxed sense of complicity between subject and object.

A similar tone pervades Jason’s figure studies of male nudes, discovered in varying degrees of soft, domestic shadows.  Here, however, he seems reluctant to reveal any overt sexuality. The men, almost uniformly lean and sinewy, are absorbed in private thought. More than any other subject in his photography, Jason’s male nudes represent a departure from the sexual innuendo and moral ambiguity found in film noir.  Ultimately Jason’s solitary man goes in search of clues of the metaphysical variety, asking all the while: Who are we? Why are we here? What’s the unseen reality?  Things are not as they may at first appear to be, and shadows may in the end better suit a mood of contemplation than pleasure or fear.  Yet in the absence of any narrative or visual authority, viewers, like the lone individuals in Jason’s photographs, must exercise self-reliance and find the answers for themselves.

John Hill, 2013

Twenty Years: Afterward

I first met Jason Langer in 1999. We were both living in San Francisco. I walked a couple blocks away from my house to Jason’s flat to pick up a few press prints he had made of some of Ruth Bernhard’s images. The Shapiro Gallery was getting ready to launch a show of Ruth’s famous nudes from the 1930s. 

The first thing I noticed when I walked into his flat was that it was almost entirely devoted to photography. There were boxes of negatives and prints neatly lining all the shelves and stacked in piles on the floor. There was a makeshift ledge “gallery” lining the walls with framed black and white prints on display. I picked up the press prints but found that Jason was in the middle of working on some other intriguing black and white photographs. They were images of dark, shadowy figures - men and women - in urban settings. Although their faces were obscured the figures in this undefined city were obviously involved in some kind of private drama. 

The sweet sounds of vintage jazz were playing from Jason’s stereo but the images of the solitary figures roaming city streets and dimly lit rooms were both enticing and disconcerting. They fascinated me. I asked Jason what he was working on and he simply said he was working on his own work. I knew he was a good printer but didn’t know Jason was also a skilled photographer. Jason himself was and is still earnest, self-effacing, diligent, smart and edgy. 

It might have been the music in combination with the vintage Kertesz images I was recently viewing but Jason’s work seemed as if it was created at around the same time. In fact, that whole first introduction to Jason’s world was a bit unusual. One simply didn’t expect to find a well-dressed young man of 31 listening to vintage jazz immersed in obviously introspective traditional black and white photographs. I have known Jason for 15 years and he is definitely a man who lives in a different time.

I began collecting in 1972 and became particularly interested in photography created between the world wars. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz, Paul Strand and Edward Weston are only a handful of the significant Modernist photographers that dazzled me. What attracts me to the photographs of this period is the firmness of the “straight” aesthetic- finding complex and intriguing images in the physical world of the everyday - while having no limitation to imagination. Each of these photographers exhibited a unique perspective and approach to black and white photography. Some were more interested in the documentary, some more interested in the personal or poetic, but all of these artists were committed to black and white photography and hand held film cameras as being their method of exploring the city, urban life and the extraordinary found in the everyday. Jason’s tools, subject matter and approach is exactly the same. In the 1990s it was - and still is- unusual to find a photographic artist immersed in the same search for beauty and meaning.

The reason I collect, show and sell photographs from this time period is that the concerns addressed so effectively by these artists - Langer included - are still pertinent. Our relationships to each other, to the city, to ourselves and the beauty found in the exploration of those relationships hasn’t changed. I have never been interested in color photography. Digital imaging so far holds no interest for me. Life in the 1920s and 1930s was just as complex as it is now - and as Langer sees the world, so do I; poetic, romantic, dangerous, filled with light and possibility. The world reduced to black and white reveals life’s main themes without the distraction of color. The world as it is - without the intrusion of Photoshop - is enough to tell me all I need to know to better know myself, those around me and the urban experience. I have a feeling Jason feels the same way.

Langer is an investigator of those things that obsess him. It is not New York City, it is not the “Decisive Moment”, it is not the beauty of the everyday and the poetry of people and things. For Langer it is all of these things and more. Langer has created his own mysterious world of romance and portent and every year that passes, he becomes more and more invested in exploring and exhibiting that world.

When I show Langer’s photographs alongside those of the early classic modernists, the themes, approach and feelings are the same. The only difference between the two is time. In viewing Langer’s classic work, it’s easy to forget that his images are contemporary photographs created in the “post” modern era. Langer is not interested in deconstructing photography or the usefulness of image making in today’s world. He is not interested in criticizing our culture with the blunt tools of cynicism and Photoshop cloning. Instead he implores the viewer to ask questions about the nature of reality and empowers the viewer to imagine their own story - beginning, middle and end - on their own terms. Langer understands photography’s gift to show the viewer the world via a mechanical lens, and the connections between the stories found on the “inside” and the “outside” worlds.  

I encourage all readers of this book to find the opportunity to view Jason’s work in person. Seek out one of Jason’s prints and hold it in your hand. Langer’s images are not intended to be seen on screen or even in book form. Langer’s images are meant to be seen on a daily basis, while walking down the hall or relaxing in a chair. They are especially appreciated while listening to Billie Holiday or Duke Ellington and nursing a whiskey and water.

Photography is a gift, one of discovery and revelation frozen in time. I have found that only a handful of contemporary photographers possess the opportunity and dedication to illuminate the world with clarity, humor, grace, sensuality and restraint. Let your eyes and spirit enjoy his photographs or even Jason himself before the last of the analog photographers are gone forever. 

Michael Shapiro, 2013

The Alchemy of the Everyday

To possess something is to occupy it or control it. And this idea manifests itself throughout Jason Langer’s new monograph Possession. The moody black-and-white images have a spontaneity to them, as if Langer happened to capture these moments while strolling through a city, a park or a random apartment building. Yet the book as a whole is a very deliberate representation of how humans, objects and places can be possessed.

Langer’s use of shadows and focus when photographing people informs the reader what his subjects are – a carousel operator a dancer , a pedestrian, a cowboy- but never answers who the are. These figures are strangers in a familiar land. Capable of either entrancing others to the point of possession, as represented by the sensual studies of female figures, or being self-possessed by how they project themselves in society at large, as communicated through their clothing or body language.

Meanwhile objects are photographed with an almost supernatural clarity. Mannequins, an empty bed, carousel horses and a puppet all feel otherworldly, as it they contain some leftover impression of the humans that once interacted with them. Adding to the mystery are engrossing shots of places that seem recognizable, but, thanks to Langer’ unique perspective, are unknown. A building-lined city street feels all the more claustrophobic when a tiny, lone pedestrian is in the frame. A crow-like bird on a fence post adds eeriness to a photo of an old house. An empty alley decorated with wrought iron and wooden shutters radiates the history of the place; it is paired with a photo of an almost empty subway station that is likely just as old, but seems conversely modern. 

These enthralling images have the poser to hypnotize the reader, and in the end make us consider how we all could be captivated by the everyday if we just pay attention.

Photo District News, 2013

In Search of Lost Time

American photographer Jason Langer is best known for his masterful black and white images of contemporary urban life.  Evoking the lustrous style of an earlier age of photography – epitomized by names like Stiegliz, Brassai, Brandt, and DeCarava – Langer’s carefully crafted images, rich with lush, black tones, exude an air of vintage, timeless beauty.  In many ways Langer holds true to an idea of picture-making that had begun to fall out of fashion as early as the 1960s with the rise of social criticism in photography.  His images are not motivated by an impulse to document so much as to delight and disorient, and in so doing to ignite the imagination.

Langer’s photography can be seen to be in reaction against many of the popular trends of the last several decades – not only social realism, whose artistic roots admittedly extend back to the 19th century, but in particular the staged tableau (compare Tina Barney, Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, Gregory Crewdson) and the so-called “deadpan” or “New Objectivity” aesthetic (compare Rineke Dijkstra, Mitch Epstein, Stephen Shore).  Like Baudelaire’s flâneur, Langer sees himself as a version of “the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes,” (Sontag, On Photography).  While the central artistic act in much of contemporary photography occurs long before the camera is ever touched by the photographer, Langer's images return us to a place where what happens in front of the lens is unanticipated and distinctly photographic.  Neither directing the placement or look of his subjects, nor complacent to capture them in the banal light of the everyday, Langer searches out the cracks in ordinary reality in order to expose the mystery and wonder of having a body and of finding our place in the world.

If Langer’s photographic vocabulary is indebted to the iconic black and white aesthetics of modernism, it is precisely to lift the viewer out of the realm of the everyday, mired in the details of a specific place and time.  It is true that Langer has spent the bulk of his career photographing specific cities – New York, New Orleans, Paris, London, Berlin – and often with an interest in portraying a recognizable landmark or city symbol – the Siegessäule in Berlin, for example; but it is also true that the portrait of one city blurs uncannily into the next.  “I am always trying to recreate the same photograph,” says Langer.  For this photographer, architecture and the natural world are props on the stage of the human mind in action, and accordingly his images are at once studies of universal figures situated in space as well as portraits of the psyche within.  

Like the surrealists of the 20s and 30s, Langer possesses a knack for picturing the subconscious mind, for absorbing the viewer in a dream world where almost anything seems possible.  But unlike his predecessors, Hans Bellmer and Maurice Tabard to name only two, Langer’s surreal gesture is performed without recourse to such photographic tricks as the double exposure, combination printing, solarization, rotation, or other similar distortions.  The surreal element in a Langer photograph is, instead, more subtle.  It is achieved in the representation of a subject that upon reflection invariably seems to oscillate in the mind as if a déjà vu – simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, animate and inanimate, human and alien.  Walking the nocturnal streets of a Langer image we might be in America or Europe – it is often hard to know – but we feel as if we have been there before.  Observing the meticulously tied bow of a waitress or the starched white shirt of a black porter we are ineluctably drawn into our own memories, our own imaginations.  These faceless images could just as easily have been taken 50 or 60 years ago.  Has anything changed since then?  Who are these individuals?  We will never know, and the effect is a nostalgic mix of the comforting and the creepy.

In fact, human subjects as individuals rarely appear in this exhibition, for Langer seems more interested to capture their generic identities – male, female, artist, athlete – all the better to probe a universal theme.  Langer explores what it means to be human not only by photographing people, but also their human doppelgängers: puppets, robots, mannequins, statues, masks, wax models, and so on.  Strangely, these subjects often feel more life-like and individualized than their human counterparts.  We’re made, for example, to look wonderingly into the dark eyes of a boy painted with a Mona Lisa smile.  In another photo a puppet’s eyes glare down at us menacingly, its lips parted mid-breath.  And in yet another a headless mannequin seems to slouch with disaffection away from its more stylishly dressed friends.  

The simplicity of these images magnifies their power over us – to spook, to titillate, to amuse.  Several critics have noted that the mood and ambiance of a Langer photo shares much in common with the genre of film noir with its fondness for stark, haunting images illuminated with low-key lighting and dramatic shadow patterning; and Langer has himself admitted a love of Hitchcock, Huston, and Welles.  Films like The Third Man, The Maltese Falcon, and Strangers on a Train are favorites of Langer’s from his childhood.  One image from Strangers on a Train which has remained a touchstone for Langer is the moment when the protagonist, Guy, observes the scoundrel Bruno watching him from the steps of the Jefferson Memorial.  Bruno, dressed in a black suit and hat, appears compositionally at one with the architecture at the same time that he exists as a blot upon its pristine whiteness.  It is an unsettling image about a stalker, and yet more abstractly it is an image Langer identifies with and returns to again and again in his photography: a lone figure within a cityscape, a quiet watchfulness, a sense of risk or danger. Compare, for example, Langer’s image Stresmannstrasse (2011) from his Berlin series: here a solitary man stands on the edge of an East Berlin office building, framed by dramatic storm clouds.

The image of the lone and silent stalker is congruent with the image of the private eye, another familiar topos of the film noir genre, and Langer has repeatedly presented the allusion center stage: a fedora and trench coat in silhouette, a curl of smoke in the air, tracks on a rain swept street.  Film noir typically tells the story of an investigation into a crime.  Just so, in Langer’s parallel universe the possibility of foul play lurks just outside the camera’s frame, fortified by our imaginations.  Another denizen of Langer’s universe, one equally at home in film noir, is the femme fatal.  Sexy images of women spied in red light districts, reflected in the mirror of their boudoir, lying naked in a hotel in the early morning light – or just as often rendered in pieces: black stockings and high heel shoes, a bob wig, a torso undressed – recur throughout Langer’s oeuvre.  These shadowy, nameless women are creatures of fantasy and dreams; they seem simultaneously to entice and distance the viewer in scenes imbued with a relaxed sense of complicity between subject and object.

A similar tone pervades Langer’s figure studies of male nudes, discovered in varying degrees of soft, domestic shadows.  Here, however, Langer seems reluctant to reveal any overt sexuality. The men, almost uniformly lean and sinewy, are absorbed in private thought. More than any other subject in his photography, Langer’s male nudes represent a departure from the sexual innuendo and moral ambiguity of film noir.  Ultimately Langer’s imaginary detective goes in search of clues of the metaphysical variety, asking all the while: Who are we? Why are we here? What’s the unseen reality?  Things are not as they may at first appear to be, and shadows may in the end better suit a mood of contemplation than pleasure or fear.  Yet in the absence of any narrative or visual authority, viewers, like the lone individuals in Langer’s photographs, must exercise self-reliance and find the answers for themselves.

John Hill, 2012

Possession

Freud famously associated the idea of the “uncanny” with uncertainty.  More than just producing an experience of fear, the uncanny requires an encounter with a facsimile of the real.  Puppets, automatons, mannequins, and human doppelgängers of all kinds exist at the intersection of the real and the imaginary, and in their life-likeness they can disturb our sense of what we consider familiar and ordinary.  Just so, for his Possession series Jason Langer offers the spectator an uncanny intimacy with objects that appear life-like, that blur the line between the animate and the inanimate.  

Possession marks something of a departure for Langer.  In his earlier images of people he conspicuously turns his focus away from the investigation of an individual’s personality in favor of details that suggest a more generic or universal identity.  A waitress is photographed from the back, the white bow of her apron exquisitely tied; the silhouette of a gentleman in overcoat and fedora stands beneath an American flag; a singer croons into a 40s-era microphone, his eyes obscured in shadow.  Langer’s subjects remain anonymous, aspiring as they do to the status of the iconic.  

His portraits of objects, by contrast, take full interest in the faces and feelings of the things themselves.  We’re made, for example, to look wonderingly into the dark eyes of a boy painted with a Mona Lisa smile.  A puppet’s eyes, however, glare down at us menacingly, its lips parted mid-breath.  Even one of Langer’s headless mannequins seems to slouch with disaffection away from its more stylishly dressed friends.  “I am drawn to the human emotions in things,” Langer says.  “And for this series my approach has been to capture them like a researcher collecting specimens.”

 If an exploration of the personal and felt world of objects is new territory for Langer, his photographic approach remains the same.  Like the images in his first monograph, Secret City, the palette of Possession predominates in rich, moody blacks lending an aura of mystery and risk to his subjects which typically exist in a state of only partial illumination.  Avoiding staged tableaux on the one hand, and the “deadpan” aesthetic popular in much contemporary photography on the other, Langer’s images strive always to capture the unanticipated or chance moment, layered with timeless drama and dynamism.

Indeed time—whether it figures as a fleeting moment or eternity—is itself a recurring theme of his photography.  In Possession the objects appear frozen out of time, their bodies immobilized forever in expressions of despair or desire or delight.  They are at once alive and mute, agent and object, recognizable reflections of our own inner lives but also distinctly foreign and artificial.  This experience of ambivalence is precisely the uncanny which Langer—not unlike one of his earliest inspirations, Hitchcock—crafts so well.  

Langer’s fascination with the subjects of time and personality can be explained by more than just an attraction to the uncanny.  His longstanding interest in Buddhist philosophy also informs his art.  In Buddhism, all of the effects of an individual ego or personality are considered ephemeral, and all that is real and eternal is described as the mind or consciousness that encompasses all life.  The human double then—especially as it takes the suspended or fragmentary forms of a petrified doll, a headless mannequin, or a bloodless statue preserved behind glass—serves in part as a symbol for the Buddhist principle of impermanence and a reminder of the illusion of ego.  “In Buddhism,” says Langer, “life itself is ultimately understood as an illusory dream.”  Without articulating it, Langer has married Buddhism and the uncanny.  Or more properly, he has observed that Buddhism is itself uncanny because within its ambit the most unnerving—or reassuring, depending on one’s point of view—aspect of Possession is the feeling of self-estrangement with which it leaves the viewer, the sense that we are more similar to the objects in his images than we may have first believed.  In Buddhism, enlightenment only occurs after the recognition that we are all wearing a frozen mask. 

John Hill, 2011

Figures

For Jason Langer, architecture and the natural world have always been props on the stage of the human mind in action, and accordingly his images of nudes are at once studies of universal figures situated in space as well as portraits of the psyche within.  Ultimately, however, these figure studies function as invitations for reflection and storytelling—not a single story, and not the photographer’s story—but the spectator’s own idiosyncratic train of associations and memories.

In order to achieve this quality, here in his figure studies as elsewhere, Langer eschews description and factual detail in lieu of idealized forms and gestures. Langer’s practice is instinctual and unpremeditated.  He is concerned above all with capturing mood and feelings which are suggested, never declared.  Typically his figures’ faces are occluded from the image so that the viewer will focus on nothing but the bodies within the frame: a foot turned inward on a stair, a pair of knees close-up, a rib cage pressing out against the skin.  Are these expressions of bashfulness or seduction or something else entirely?  His subjects are not only nameless and dateless—hence the convention for titling the images numerically—they are not even called nudes but “figures”, universal abstractions in space open to a world of interpretation.

A former photo educator, Langer is well versed in the history of nude photography as well as its feminist critique; and while he is aware of the so-called “male gaze” in which a gendered power asymmetry is reproduced within the frame, gender politics are not, per se, a concern of his work.  Whether he photographs a man or a woman his interest is the same: to explore the private, reflective moment in search of traces of the universal.  As a result, his figures are imbued with a relaxed sense of complicity between the subject and object that seems simultaneously to entice and distance the viewer.

Langer began photographing the nude and semi-nude figure almost by accident. While working on his “Secret City” series in 1998 he was introduced to a female friend through a mutual friend.  He followed her through the streets of Brooklyn to her flat.  Thus began a feminine presence in his work that had previously been absent.

Langer creates his images out of a kind of intimate tug of war with his subjects. He vacillates between intimacy with his subjects and distance from them. When making images of people in the street he tends to choose distance, looking for telling gesture and a relationship to surrounding settings and objects. When photographing in a more intimate setting such as nudes in a private home, Langer works with his subjects to find the most comfortable, unique and expressive gestures for each individual. He spends time with his sitters discussing their thoughts and feelings about themselves and their surroundings, all the while following and photographing them, looking for iconic moments where person, place and thing come together to tell an intimate story about that individual at that time. The stories are never fully answered but rather remain open-ended questions.

Then as now Langer is drawn most of all to capturing the solitary moments in the lives of his models, quiet moments which are often bathed in shadow.  Some critics have suggested that Langer’s attraction to the shadowy side of life exemplifies a dare-devil sensibility imbuing his photographs with portent, but for Langer shadows are associated as much with contemplation and a life of the mind as they are with questionable moral values.  In fact, Langer’s own philosophy tends toward an existentialist view of the world in which the categories of good and bad are understood to be manmade constructions.  His images, thus, seek to represent an amoral universe in which the individual is a free agent charged with creating his own values. A long time Buddhist practitioner, the spectre of impermanence is ever present.

“I am always trying to recreate the same photograph,” says Langer.  His images of the male and female figure are bound up in a larger quest for the essential, ultimate nature of being.  Langer is the quintessential philosopher-photographer: observant, curious, reflective, and faithful above all that the secrets and mysteries of life may be revealed through quiet, careful attention.

John Hill, 2011

The Diamond and The Lotus

by John Stevens

            Who does not delight

            In the bliss found in the

            Union of diamond and lotus?

            Who is not fulfilled there?

                        ~ Saraha, Tantric philosopher

Tantra—the ancient science of realization and the art of living—maintains that sexual embrace with the right partner, at the right time, in the right place, and with the right frame of mind, can lead to the ecstasy of enlightenment. This perfect union between two human beings is not abstract, intellectual, or metaphorical; it is as concrete as can be, flesh and blood, actual in time and space: “No body, no chance of Buddhahood.”

Once a couple comes truly together—progressing from excitement through engagement, consummation, and transcendence—a pure knowledge emerges. The sensitive, subtle photographs by Jason Langer of various mudra—the interlocking sexual postures assumed by a man and a woman to bind their bodies together, positions that are assumed to seal their union--depict a loving couple, seeking perfect physical harmony and true intimacy. Like all the best erotic art, the photos convey the beauty, power, and magic of sex; they express a vision of sex that is loving, sympathetic, and inspired; they are images that celebrate the essential erotic and elevating nature of human life.

            The union of diamond and lotus brings a couple to perfection;

            Non-duality of self and other is the supreme law of sages;

            Breaking the shackles that bind body and mind brings liberation;

            In real sex two bodies can become Buddha!

John Stevens, Lust for Enlightenment, 2009