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