Elger Esser (born 1967 in Stuttgart, raised in Rome) is known for his silent, almost meditative large-format landscapes. Although a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Esser nevertheless backed away from their characteristic industrial and architectural landscapes to pursue the exploraiton of nature.

German photographer Elger Esser (born 1967 in Stuttgart, raised in Rome) is usually associated with silent, almost meditative landscapes in large formats and with earthy colors. Esser was a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Academy of Arts in Dusseldorf, the same school where talents such as Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Struth were formed. While clearly influenced by their teachings, Esser nevertheless backed away from their characteristic industrial and architectural landscapes and the rigorous style connected with them. Esser’s semi-romantic landscapes are unmanipulated and usually work with a very low horizon line in a simple, almost empty composition. Nature becomes a totality, indefinite and mysterious, but yet also calming and steady. Sky and water blur into each other to a point of complete disappearance, where everything seems to be mirrored by the same vast emptiness of the sky. As one of the most prominent photographic artists in Germany, Esser's works can be found in the collections of top museums and galleries in New York, Paris, and Amsterdam.

Elger Esser

Elger Esser’s pale, luminous landscape photographs, which are almost entirely unpeopled and frequently feature a straight, low horizon line, have been compared to both early-19th-century photography and Dutch landscape paintings of the 17th century.

Esser’s Giverny series revisits Monet’s famous garden from a different angle than what we are used to seeing. Esser explores this common visual memory of this iconic art destination and deconstructs it, by taking the images to a level of abstraction where the place itself becomes almost unrecognizable.

Show all results

“ Landscapes are like states of mind. Everyone carries a landscape within them, one they naturally idealize. „

—Elger Esser