Elger Esser's Travelogue

Dan Tranberg

From the invention of the first stabilized photographic image to the advent of digital media, the evolution of photography as an art form has almost always been linked to technological innovations. Now that artists can make photographs the size of buildings, and create photographic images without ever stepping foot into a darkroom, what role does photography’s past play in current uses of the medium?

The recent work of German photographer Elger Esser travels back and forth within the history of photography’s technological journey, pulling from both its picturesque past and its furthest cutting edge. His large-scale enlargements of nineteenth-century postcards straddle the extremes of sentimental gestures and dazzling displays of the triumph of digital printing. In doing so, they invoke the vast shifts that have occurred in the fundamental ways in which photography functions in art as well as our daily lives.

Esser was born in Stuttgart in 1967 and was raised in Rome. He moved to Düsseldorf in 1986, where he worked as a commercial photographer until 1991. He then studied with famed artists and photography professors Bernd and Hilla Becher until 1997. He continues to live and work in Düsseldorf.

Several recent works by Esser, on loan from New York’s Sonnabend Gallery, were on view recently at the Cleveland Clinic’s main campus, persuasively demonstrating the Clinic’s new commitment to establishing a world-class art program.

The works on view combine two strands of Esser’s past, the first of which began with a more-or-less-traditional approach to landscape photography, emphasizing the transformative potential of nuanced images of land and sky, often captured on trips to scenic villages. The second stems from Esser’s life-long avocation as a collector of antique postcards. He reportedly has amassed some 20,000 postcards, which he has meticulously catalogued. Evidence of the latter is present not only in the most obvious sense (each image is actually an enlarged postcard from his collection) but also in his titles, which include a single word (often the name of the town or location depicted on the postcard) and a series of numbers corresponding to his system of cataloging his collection.

Esser’s tactic of making enormous works from postcards that were originally created as small mementos carries myriad implications in terms of shifts in meaning, but most apparent visually is the way that these enlarged postcards take on abstract qualities as each becomes so distorted that it appears as an almost-Impressionistic image.

Many current artists who make large-scale works using digital photographic processes, such as Jeff Wall and Thomas Demand, rely on the believability of gloriously detailed high-resolution images. Esser does the opposite, emphasizing the breakdown of the image by way of the process of reproduction and enlargement. His resulting works exaggerate the imperfect images of photography’s past, transforming them into captivating hybrids of old and new technologies—snapshots of photography’s ongoing voyage through time.

Elger Esser: Travelogue

The Cleveland Clinic

October 2, 2006 - January 11, 2007

Article first appeared in Issue 31, March/April 2007