ClampArt Has Announced JASON LANGER | FIGURES An Artsy Online Exclusive Exhibition

In the late nineties and early aughts, artist Jason Langer placed ads on Craigslist for anyone, male or female, willing to allow him to photograph them naked in their personal, intimate spaces as they went about their evening routines.

Langer kept his subjects moving naturally, avoiding props, although he would occasionally ask them to pause so he could make a photo. He aspired to be a voyeur, surreptitiously witnessing private lives. Although the images were not intended to be erotic, he sometimes would sense erotic energy in the room, as typically the space was occupied only by model, photographer, and camera.

Langer writes: "I was thinking about bodies not so much as vessels but as masculine and feminine principles. I had Carl Jung's theory of the Animus and Anima in mind-that within each of us is a mix of the two, and that, throughout our lives, they are in constant dialog seeking integration. In photographing women my interest was in understanding femininity and, at best, absorbing it within myself. By avoiding photographing the face, I was hoping to omit personality and ego, and to depict male and female bodies as universal representations."

However, by the end of his ten-year exploration, Langer began to find that making portraits of his subjects was unavoidable, and he asked some sitters to look directly in the camera. In the end, though, he found himself photographing men and women in the same way: "My eye made no distinction between the genders and I depicted them all as open, unguarded, and in repose. I found masculine and feminine qualities in both bodies so convincingly, the terms lost meaning." Ultimately, Langer created images of solitude, photographing people in their homes with their minds at rest unencumbered by technology, relationships, and to-do lists.

The exhibition consists of thirty-one 20 x 16-inch gelatin silver prints. Select exhibition prints are available for view at the gallery.

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 depicts 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 a sought-after photography teacher at the university level and for workshops. He currently is teaching for Santa Fe Workshops. Langer is now in the process of producing his fourth book-Berlin.