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