Jason Langer & Thomas Schestag at Passages Bookshop

Sunday, June 11, 6:30 pm
Doors open at 6:00 pm; no late entry
Free admission

Passages Bookshop
1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660
Portland, OR 97209
503-388-7665
www.passagesbookshop.com

Passages Bookshop presents Jason Langer & Thomas Schestag in conversation, to celebrate the publication of Jason Langer’s recent book of photographs BERLIN

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Berlin (Kerber Verlag) is a five-year photographic project on the city of Berlin from the eyes of a Jewish photographer who grew up in Israel and who was deeply affected by his yearly visits to the kibbut’s Holocaust memorial every Yom Hashoah.

The images, shot on black-and-white film, constitute a walk through the city, with an eye towards places where Jews hid or were deported during the Second World War.

Photographing from a feeling of outsized fear about Germany and German people, Langer made images of some of the darkest as well as brightest places in the city. The images are a moody mixture of the tragic, joyous, and erotic.

Jason Langer is a photographer primarily known for his noirish visions of figures in urban settings. He has exhibited his work with Benrubi Gallery (NYC), Galerie Esther Wordehoff (Paris), Kopeikin Gallery (Los Angeles), Gilman Contemporary (Idaho), and SFO Museum (San Francisco), among other venues, and has published four books – Secret City and Possession (both from Nazraeli), Twenty Years (Radius), and Berlin (Kerber). Langer’s photographs are held in permanent collections, including the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Zimmerli Art Museum, and International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, and are represented by CLAMP (NYC), Galerie Esther Woerdehoff (Paris), and Gilman Contemporary (Sun Valley, ID). Langer lives in Portland. https://www.jasonlanger.com/

Thomas Schestag, widely published writer and translator, teaches literature in the Department of German Studies at Brown University. His special interests include theories of names and naming, and the intersection of philosophy, philology, poetics, and politics. Recent publications include Namenlose (Matthes & Seitz), and translations of Rosmarie Waldrop (Hölderlin-Hybride, from Urs Engeler) and Francis Ponge (Le soleil / die sönne, from Matthes & Seitz).

Langer is a confident photographer whose epic images recall the spirit of modernist auteurs like Brassai, Steichen, Kertesz, and Renger-Patzsch. ‘Berlin’ is his most personal book in that it traces the artist’s Jewish roots, his time on an Israeli kibbutz, and what it means for a contemporary American photographer to walk the streets where some of the greatest horrors of the 20th c. were planned and executed. Langer’s collection of muscular images of architecture and alleyways where the ghosts of history can be felt are punctuated by moments of quiet sensuality. — Mark Alice Durant, Saint Lucy Books