Jason Langer
Photographers that are difficult to categorize are among my most favorite of a visual artist. You cannot pin them down to one type of work, yet you can identify them by the style and grace that they provide in their photographs. One such person that fits this description, perhaps better than any other, would be Jason Langer. Whether it be still life, figure study, or noirish photographs of the world’s dark and mysterious streets - there is a small piece of Jason in each of them. This is an aesthetic that transcends genres or genders or worldview. They are universal in their appeal. Jason’s photographs form a romantic, alluring, and tender approach that lies within each frame and reminds us of moments of our own past, for better or worse, and with an introspective quality that makes one think that Jason himself may have some knowledge of ourselves that even we did not understand.
I also think it’s interesting that Jason’s a lover of jazz, which I found out about him in the forward to his first monograph, Secret City, written by the one and only Michael Kenna. I’ve often thought that jazz music was a masterful musical language that was as chaotic and unexpected as life itself. Quite possibly the most informed reflection of what a human life goes through in musical terms. There is often no easily seen road to be taken, yet we persevere and carry on, even when a complete understanding of where it will lead us is unknown. I love that about Jason’s imagery - it encompasses myriad subjects with similar qualities, and presents them as a subjective collection that feels quite personal to each of us somehow. There are reflections of all of us in the shadows, we simply need to courage to peer ahead and walk into those dark spaces to understand them. I’m ready to step forward, how about you?
Erika - I remember asking you to photograph me, 2010
Bio -
Best known for his psychological and noirish visions of contemporary urban life and meditations on inhabiting a body, Jason Langer’s work has been featured in numerous international photographic exhibitions and museum collections. Langer has published three monographs: Secret City (Nazraeli) , Possession (Nazraeli) and Jason Langer: Twenty Years (Radius) which depict urban life with “carefully crafted compositions reminiscent of the symbolist photographers, and swathes of meticulously printed deep black tones…as much Hopper and Raymond Chandler as Steichen” (Bomb Magazine).
Langer has also appeared in select publications including American Photo, Black and White, Life, Photo District News, Popular Photography, Time, and Vanity Fair. Langer is also a sought after photography teacher at university level and workshops.
Interview -
Michael Kirchoff: What brought you into the life of a visual artist and how did you develop the skill set that led to some earlier successes?
Jason Langer: Great question, Michael. Let me also say thank you for asking me to speak on Catalyst. It’s great that you’ve created a forum for photographers to talk and read about what draws us to make pictures.
While I was still in high school I house-sat for a woman who had Michael Kenna prints all over her walls. I wrote to Kenna, stayed in touch with him as I worked my way through a liberal arts degree at University of Oregon, and when the time came to graduate, Kenna offered me a part time job working with him in San Francisco. Apprenticing with Kenna taught me more in four months than all four years of college. I souped Michael’s film, made his contact sheets, drymounted and retouched his prints. I also watched him stamp, sign and edition his work. I went to Kenna’s exhibitions and talked with him numerous times about the business. I soaked in his aesthetic by working with him and his prints for those first five years after graduating college in 1989.
Part of the way I made a living in those early years aside from assisting Kenna was by printing and retouching for other artists, including Margaretta Mitchell, Ruth Bernhard, Arthur Tress, Hansel Mieth and James Fee. I also did a bunch of editorial and corporate photography and worked on my own personal projects on which I would receive feedback from Kenna. He taught me multitudes about composition, editing, and building a body of work; I’m a “learn by doing” kind of artist and in those early years I was steeped in it. I also met photography dealers through Michael who gave me feedback, and showed and sold my work.
I think of myself as part of the last generation of photographers that could make a decent living through freelancing in photography before the digital revolution effectively made everyone a photographer.
I used medium format cameras, had a darkroom and knew how to expose black and white and transparency film (for editorial). I honed a sought-after and rare skill set. I then started teaching (at the Academy of Art University), shooting portraits and weddings, and selling my personal work as stock. I began to have shows and sell prints. At the time there were relatively few people involved in photography at this level. These days, we are living in a sea of skilled and talented photographers where the technical bar for entry is low.
MK: In looking through the different bodies of work and books you’ve created over the years, it looks like you have made some dramatic changes to the subject matter you gravitate towards. However, it can be noted that a similar aesthetic appears consistent throughout all of these changes. How did this develop, were there significant inspirations for this to occur, and was this a conscious choice made along the way?
JL: Good question. That aesthetic (black and white, darker tones, rich blacks, tight cropping, vertical) has remained consistent through the years because early on I found the tools that worked for me and abandoned those that didn’t. I never stuck with large format as the process was too slow for me. The Zone System was not my thing. I never liked 35mm – the negative was too small. I took a color printing class in college and felt that if the objective were to eliminate color casts then a machine could do a better job than me. So that left me with medium format, black and white, working with the exposure I got from a hand-held light meter. Only in the last few years have I been experimenting with color.
There is a direct through-line to the various subjects that I have photographed. The subject matter has changed with the different chapters in my life. There is a direct connection to them all; in essence, aloneness, impermanence, having a human body and ego, and the nature of gender and desire.
It started when I was assigned the last page of Bay Area’s Diablo Magazine for three years. They had a theme each month for which they needed a photo-illustration. I created everything in-camera and often used silhouettes to illustrate my ideas. These silhouettes of human forms became a kind of “everyman” for my images. When I amassed a decent editorial portfolio I took it to various magazine art directors in New York. While there I followed and photographed random men on the street and made a body of work continuing the “everyman” idea. It began to coalesce as the man representing me and the city representing my mind. The images were masculine – men walking hard city streets.
On a subsequent visit to New York I took a chance and began to photograph a female friend of a friend named Erika. I started photographing her as a challenge to see if I could start making pictures that represented my inner feminine. I ended up photographing Erika for the next fifteen years. I felt that through her I was able to access a more feminine side of myself and my photographs. The light, textures, and forms had a different character to them. Through my years of photographing Erika I also got to know her on a deep level. We spoke often of her creative ideas, dreams, and heartbreaks, and I was able to photograph the first year after her daughter’s birth.
I would then send myself on trips to various cities where I felt I could further explore ideas of bodies in cities and concepts of the ego and personality. I started to be interested in masks, both real and metaphorical, so I sent myself to photograph the hedonism and masquerade of New Orleans during Mardi Gras. In 2004 my wife and I had our first baby and moved to Los Angeles. I became the primary caretaker of our daughter. We brought in a nanny every other day and on those days I would go to the homes of strangers that answered a Craigslist ad and photograph them naked. There I further explored the idea of male and female bodies.
After moving to Portland, OR I had the idea of putting bodies together into situations depicting desire, and again posted an ad on Craigslist for individuals and couples that would either pose for me or let me photograph them in the act of lovemaking.
I then remembered a dream I had when I was thirteen that I was sent to a deathcamp in Europe. I spent the mid-70s on a kibbutz in Israel where we were told often about the horrors of the Holocaust. The dream probably surfaced from that subconscious fear. I decided to take my dream to Berlin to see what I could find of the roots of my German last name, and get to know and photograph German people and the changing city.
That brings me to today, where I am working on new projects photographing performers in Portland who experiment with alternate personas. I am also editing images of dysmorphous bodies from the Mutter Museum of Philadelphia as well as a shorter project documenting the transitions of two trans friends. My interests center around the same few repeated themes-- personality, ego, bodies and gender-- I just find them in different places.
MK: You recently released your third book, Jason Langer: Twenty Years, through Radius Books. I’m wondering what the process of designing and editing a retrospective of work was like for you? Did it come with new challenges not seen in the making of your first two books?
JL: Designing these books was so far the easiest thing I’ve ever done in photography. The first two books I made with Nazraeli Press, and they were both collections of the best photographs that I had made over the previous ten years. Since all the images had a similar feel all I had to do was to create a kind of journey sequence for the viewer. Somehow the titles Secret City and Possession popped into my mind, so we went with them. Publisher Chris Pichler of Nazraeli is a great editor and helped me toss out some of the images, leaving only the most potent. For Possession I had the idea of using a motel-wallpaper print for the end papers and he loved the idea. Creating Jason Langer: Twenty Years with Radius was a bit more complex as it was a retrospective, but it was still pretty easy. I originally had all the images arranged by subject matter and it was publisher and designer David Chickey who suggested designing the book chronologically. It was a great idea as it showed all the projects that I worked on simultaneously. With both books I had many presales and some support from galleries and donors.
MK: What is it that drives you as a creator?
JL: Do you mean “drive” or “curse?” I’m one of these “always searching for meaning/ never satisfied” type people. I realize I have this life for a short period of time, and no matter what, end up spending my time trying to find and create photographs that help me answer the big questions that I mentioned earlier: why am I here? Why do I have a body and what do I do with it? What is my desire? What use is ego and personality during this time? Photography has always been the stimulus for me, but so are music and cinema. The drive or “curse” is simply to create – again and again. I could have easily become a musician but early on enjoyed the process of picture making. What “drives” me? It’s mysterious. I don’t know. It’s a need. It’s a search for meaning. Meditation is the only thing that allows me to land and rest in a feeling of fulfillment. My relationship with photography is to search and create. It’s an obsession.
Berliner Mauer Manmahl, 2009
Bow, 1999
Bridge, 2002
Camden Lock, 2008
Canary Wharf 1, 2008
MK: Working in the arts, in any form, is a difficult and stressful road to travel down. Do you find that the steps you take towards success, or even survival (especially these days), have changed over time?
JL: Firstly, the word “success” is going to mean different things to different people. For me it has always meant being able to enjoy a life in photography while also incorporating other aspects of a well-rounded life. It’s never meant making a lot of money. If I were motivated by money, I’d be trading stocks or currency, or I’d be involved in tech in some way. I’ve always defined success as being able to continue doing photography while also keeping a healthy body, a stable relationship, family, and enjoy some travel and entertainment. To me, that’s “success.”
However, the manifestation of that success has changed over the years. Before I got married, I created that success by constantly doing anything I could related to photography, like commercial photography, printing for other photographers, teaching, stock, editorial, or print and book sales. It was stressful but exciting. Making rent every month was a great motivator to keep working and pursuing dollars. After I got married, my photographic life and dreams melded with another person’s life and dreams. We decided that my partner would pursue a career as a medical specialist and I would do anything I could to support her. We agreed to have children and that I would be the primary caretaker. Suddenly she became the workaholic and I slowly let go of certain aspects of my photographic career, like editorial and corporate photography, as I knew I wouldn’t be available. I continued to teach and print and create my personal work. And I began to be the diaper changer-in-chief.
When my kids were young - in the early 2000s - the Internet was still starting to take off. I began teaching online. Stock sales came from Getty Images’ wide Internet reach. For those early childhood years, my focus was primarily on the kids and photography became secondary. I still managed to photograph personal projects - that never stopped. Now that I have teens who are more self-sufficient I can bring back many aspects of photography that I had previously let go. So my needs and how I am needed has changed over the years, but my definition of “success” has stayed the same. Interestingly, how I define “survival” has changed. These days there isn’t a scramble for rent and childcare – we’re through the trenches. Now, I would define the challenge for “survival” as more in the realm of staying creatively relevant in this rapidly changing world. But that’s a different conversation altogether. Lately, my biggest challenge is learning to be more social and extroverted, which is increasingly becoming a requirement in photography. I think a lot of artists are having a hard time during COVID. In the last 5-10 years there have been so many people flooding the photography world that “survival” and “reward” can be conveniently defined as the ability to keep doing it altogether.
MK: This is a frequent question for me, as it is something that I continually struggle with. How does time management come into play in your career? Clearly the constant juggling of work, family, socializing, etc., even when there is crossover at times, has to be addressed in this career choice.
JL: Yes, I would say family, relationship time and health have been the hardest things to weave into a photographic life, which I have always found to be a solitary pursuit. But I have always valued photography and the rest of a well-rounded life as equally important. That’s the trick – how can one be fully involved in both when both require your whole self? For me, this has been the hardest thing to navigate. The goal for me has been to find deep commitment and balance in both worlds. Over the years I developed an image in my mind that I rely on as guidance. I always imagined my outstretched arm with a spring underneath that would always bring it back to photography no matter how many times it was pushed away by life’s other demands.
When you’re as obsessed as I am about photography, the hardest thing is to be pushed away from it for a prolonged period of time. I still find it hard to disconnect from photography for family vacations, but ultimately, I know it’s good for me.
Thankfully, I’m a pretty organized person. I try to be involved with photography regularly, every day. I try to keep to a schedule. As a work-at-home parent who often breaks up the day with things related to children, It’s easy to feel that my day is wasting away without “accomplishing” anything. I’m not a “routine” oriented person but I try to get it all in every day. My trick, I think, is staying organized and consistent. But it took many, many years to establish a kind of regularity, especially when the kids were little. They always came first. I always looked for some kind of “hack” with raising kids and being an artist, but there really isn’t one. The only hack is patience, waiting until they become more independent. I’ll say it again: mixing family and art is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The book Daily Rituals by Mason Currey has been a supportive read in all this. It is a book of anecdotes of how various artists have organized their days.
MK: Do you collaborate with like-minded individuals on projects, or do you find it more productive to handle everything yourself? Are there any collaborations in the past that have been particularly beneficial?
JL: This is something I look forward to in the future. So far all of my photographic pursuits have been solo. I recently opened a publishing imprint named Reflecting Pool and after I publish some of my own long term projects I will look towards using it to publish others’ work.
Figure no. 53, 2003
Figure no. 71, 2006
Figure no. 203, 2011
Mudra 32, 2007
Mudra 55, 2008
MK: How do you know if you’re ever really done with a specific body of work? Do you ever go back to revisit images or collections to improve upon what you felt was previously finished?
JL: Great question. I periodically return to previous projects because my understanding of them changes over time, which in turn informs my current and future direction. I generally work in long-term simultaneous projects. At some point with each I’ve had a feeling of starting to repeat my ideas. This is one clue I have as to when I should finish working on a body of work. I do consider myself a kind of private investigator of subjects that are personal to me, and with each one so far I have at some point had the feeling that based on my limited experience and outlook, I have understood as much as I am going to understand about that particular subject. This usually produces the feeling of being “done” and needing to move on. Sometimes it’s also outer circumstances that force the end of a project, like not being able to travel or the need for family caretaking. Sometimes there’s just the need to start something new. It can take me several years to finish a project. As an example, in 2013 I received permission to photograph the Mutter Museum collection, and so far have only made contact sheets and work prints of the work. On an unreleased project I call the Secret Society (2012-2017) I am still editing the images as I have a better understanding of my motivation for making them. Sometimes it takes time for the best images to float to the top and understanding to settle and start shining light.
MK: Do you have any other creative pursuits, or has photography become the one obsession that always takes precedence?
JL: Mental and physical health. Meditation and Buddhism. I am also a huge music fan. I listen to a lot of music and find it’s the best fuel for my work. I used to play alto saxophone but gave it up once our daughter came.
MK: I know that you have an associated career as an educator. Is this equally important to you and do you see it informing your own work in any way?
JL: Great question. I don’t think teaching has changed the way I work, but my feelings about teaching have changed over time. The entire landscape of photography has changed in the last ten years, mostly because of the rising importance of social media and snapshot photography. For many years my teaching was centered on classical techniques, technical skill, fine printing, seminal figures in the history of photography, and how to conduct long term photographic projects. Now I’m not so sure those things are so important to most students, and I question whether they still need to be. In some ways I feel like I need to put the student hat on and learn about the photographic times in which we are living. How important is the snapshot? What is the effect in our minds and what happens to photography when any image is published instantly? Does anything formal matter anymore? Does printmaking matter? Do students need to know what apertures and shutter speeds are? Do students need to know who Brassai was? Even as far back as 2005 I had students who didn’t feel they needed to know any of these things. I don’t teach from an academic perspective, more “learn by doing,” but honestly, now the “doing” is so completely different I feel I need to do what my wife needs to do every ten years as a physician: “recertify.” However, the fundamental remains the same: to encourage students to make personal photographs about their own experience.
MK: Once you’ve achieved finding your particular style or voice, do you ever feel the need to break out and follow a different path?
JL: Absolutely, especially when you’ve been doing it as long as I have. Like I said earlier, I am only now starting to learn color. I also give myself challenges from time to time. For instance, the challenge of finding where and how portraits can fit on my creative journey. For decades the faces of my sitters have primarily been turned away. I have used this motif to suggest the absence of ego. Do I have to keep photographing people in this way perpetually? No, course not, but how do I incorporate a drastically new aesthetic? Trying it out and seeing how it goes. Most of my pictures are vertical. I only started making horizonal pictures in 2009. It’s ultimately about using photography to learn more about myself and the world around me. I’m talking about a lifetime’s worth of exploration using photography (if I’m lucky), and within that time, I will make an effort to remain curious and try new things.
Erika - From a very young age, 2010
Fashion Week, 2010
Figure no. 8, 1998
Spreepark 1, 2012
Temptations, 2001
MK: Does a body of work ever begin to form strictly through the editing process? Have you ever changed the direction of a body of work midstream?
JL: Sometimes. In 2012 I had a show with Wessel+O’Conner of male nudes where we also included images of inanimate male nudes derived from pictures of statues and signs. I don’t think the direction of a body of work has changed dramatically but it’s gotten clearer as to what the project is by beginning the editing process mid-project. It can be helpful to see which images appear to be working and which don’t.
MK: On the technical side of things, what are the tools you are using to make your images? Are you a film, digital, or both kind of photographer? Does it really matter what you use?
JL: With some projects, I use film, and others, digital. For color, I have never felt comfortable using neg film, always E6 transparency film, mostly for editorial work. Now for color I use a digital 35mm camera. I still use Tri-X for my other long-term projects in black and white. I traveled across Berlin for five years with a couple Fuji film cameras with which I am very comfortable. I started using a digital camera and strobes when I started the Secret Society color work, as I was experimenting and wanted to see what I was getting shortly after I photographed. I almost think of the two as tools for “fast photography” and “slow photography.” Both are good and different photographers will use those terms interchangeably.
MK: How do you see your work progressing into the future? Do you have anything new you are currently working on that we should be on the lookout for?
JL: I am taking quarantine as an opportunity to finish projects that have been stacking up ever since Twenty Years was released. In order to release some of my newer work more expeditiously, I started Reflecting Pool to publish it myself. Other work will be published by other parties. Erika Photographs 1998-2013 was published with Reflecting Pool earlier this year. Figures: M was released by ClampArt, NYC. I will soon be releasing the Secret Society. I will also be releasing a kind of pillow book of the erotic images from the Diamond and the Lotus. I am still working on the images from the Mutter Museum collection. I am continuing to work on my Berlin project. My study of the first three years of my friends Charles and Sev’s transitions will be released as a book, whose working title is: People Always Have Issues with Their Bodies.
You can find and learn more about Jason's work at his website here.
All photographs, ©Jason Langer
