Matthias Langer

Matthias Langer was born in 1970 in Varel (Friesland), Germany.

Time as an eternal continuum is Matthias Langer's central theme. His photographs are not aimed at the representative reproduction of the pictorial objects themselves, but rather at their passing in time. Architecture and landscape, all day life objects and people serve as exemplary motifs for the revelation of time in its progression.

To achieve this, the artist works with extremely long exposures. He consistently uses analogue large-format cameras. The moment an event begins, Langer opens the aperture of his lens. Once the event is over, he closes it again. A shot can take seconds, minutes, hours, sometimes whole days or nights. ‘Time literally inscribes itself into the light-sensitive layer of the photographic carrier material,’ art historian Klaus Honnef once put it very aptly. In the end, a single image contains a chronology of moments that could only be captured one after the other by mere observation. Aesthetically condensed, Langer makes visible what happens in reality over time.

From 1990 to 1993 Langer studied art education and mathematics at the University of Oldenburg. He then moved in 1993 to the University of Fine Arts in Braunschweig, where he graduated in 2001 with a diploma in Graphic design in Photography and Typography. In 2003 he also completed his diploma in art with Dörte Eißfeldt (photography) and Lienhard von Monkiewitsch (painting). In 2004 he was a master student at the HBK Braunschweig with Prof. Dörte Eißfeldt.