Elger Esser

Photographer Elger Esser’s quietly romantic photographs riff on the classical painting genres of vedute (“view" in Italian) and landscape. Invoking the sensibility of late-18th- and 19th-century travel literature, these works are also a reflection of the artist's lifelong fascination with picture postcards. Esser was born in 1967 in Suttgart, Germany and raised in Rome. He moved to Düsseldorf to become a commercial photographer in 1991 and entered the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher, the German couple and collaborative duo best known for their series of photographic typologies of industrial structures in Europe (other students of the Bechers included Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Struth). A trip to Lyon in 1996 was a major creative turning point and proffered a new-found aesthetic focus for the young photographer, who subsequently traveled throughout Western Europe photographing natural lowlands and urban environments. Some of Esser’s work is directly influenced by European literature, as in the series Ameland images from 2000, which was inspired by Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (A la recherché du temps perdu). Esser's work, in its delicate luminosity, has also been compared to 17th-century Dutch landscape painting.

Esser has had solo exhibitions at Basel’s Fondation Herzog, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna Bologna, and the Kunstverein in Hagen in Germany, among others. In 1999, his work was included in Turin’s Biennale della Fotografia at the Fondazione Italiana per la Fotografia. Since 2006, Esser has been a professor of photography at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, and in 2008, he was a visiting professor at Folkwang Hochschule Essen. In 2010, Esser was the recipient of the Rheinischer Kunstpreis. He lives and works in Düsseldorf.