Elger Esser: Eignenzeit

Elger Esser, known to New Yorkers by his one-man shows at Sonnabend Gallery, introduces a literary, 19th-century touch to his photographic world. Interested in old lithographic processes used for postcard production, he suffuses his latest photographs, mainly landscapes, with the air of their own, imagined mode of time. For his midlife retrospective this fall in a number of European museums he chose the term Eigenzeit (Own time) for this approach, placing his work somewhere between the obvious present and an imaginary past.