Views

Waves, wells, and watersides—from his very beginnings, water has been a continuous subject of Elger Esser's photographic Vedutas and Landscapes. In his most recent series, the Dusseldorf photographer presents digitally processed, colored seaside postcards from the 1900s showing bathers and boats, rocks and froth. Selected from the artist's enormous postcard collection, these highly enlarged, grainy seascapeds exude an intriguing old-masterly quality that brigns to mind past times and the memories inscribed. Fusing antique aesthetics and digital technology, Esser proves to be an avant-garde romantic of our times, a quiet apocalyptic praising life against the disappearance of the world. Alexander Puhringer's essay relates Esser's tableaus to the classic age of discovery and th grand-tour quest for far-away places.