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