Shadow

Shadow was Jason Langer’s first long-term project and his first after committing to Buddhism, and it prefigures many of his ongoing approaches and concerns. Like subsequent projects, it’s underpinned by existentialist and Buddhist understandings. Shadow features a single model whose identity is completely obscured, whose figure stands in for universal human body in physical space and experience. Langer takes a cool look at life on earth, a vision shot as if from an alien perspective, without judgement for better or worse.

Drawing on Buddhist imagery, archetypes, Matisse’s cut-outs, and the German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Langer’s images suggest silhouettes or, as the series title suggests, shadows. Many of the shots blur the lines between what’s physical and what’s shade, one photograph showing a shadow emerging from a wall, for example, another showing a figure that could be flesh, or could equally be umbra. Actually the entire series was shot in-camera and without digital manipulation, the shadow emerging from the wall achieved by shooting the model jumping forward on a slow shutter speed; the figure that could be a shadow captured deliberately out-of-focus. 

Some of the images seem to defy gravity, by virtue of the model’s amazing physical prowess and Langer’s sheer persistence in shooting and reshooting it. These images suggest the miracle of the human body but also its limitations, as well as the all-too human desire to escape them. But they also express Langer’s curiosity about the relationship between the camera, space, and his model’s capabilities. For Langer, the series also suggests the Buddhist conception of the six realms of existence (human, animal, hell, god, demigod, and ghost) as well as the four ancient elements (earth, air, fire, and water), not least because these elements are present in all 77 images. There are photographs shot over Bucolic fields, but then there are also shots taken in front of a graffitied wall; one image is shot in the middle of an office complex, the shadow alone in a blank room with an early iteration of a computer, 

Working outside introduces an element of chance to any project but, for Langer, these chance occurrences were to be embraced. In one image the shadow lies on a dune, for example, sheets of sand flowing over his body. Similarly, though Langer sketched each photograph out before shooting it, he’s open to interpretations that differ from his own understanding of the work. Shadow is intended as an open-ended gesture on which the viewer can meditate – so much so the images have numbers rather than titles.