Light, Architecture, People and Patterns : The intriguing street photography of Jan Gessler
The first thing you notice is the way he uses angles, the way he harnesses light, the way he uses architecture as a backdrop and the patterns he is able to capture with his camera.
Copyright ⓒ Jan Gessler
We might wonder at how he embraces various perspectives to add meaning to his photographs.
Copyright ⓒ Jan Gessler
This is like a scene from Bladerunner.
Maybe it is an image conjured up by the mind of William Gibson in one of his cyberpunk novels Neuromancer, Count Zero or Mona Lisa Overdrive?
It is a weird angle.
Street photographer Jan Gessler is looking up at two people who are curiously looking down at him while he shoots them. They are encircled by a gloomy dark structure which gives the photograph a claustrophobic feel to it, a metaphor for the desire to escape and be free and yet, at the same time, the sense of being trapped by our working lives?
Perhaps?
“I called it the worm’s eye view,” Jan reveals. “For the point of view. In German it would be called ‘Froschperspektive’. Which means frog’s perspective.”
Jan told me it was a series of photographs he was working on taken from this super low position and POV (point of view)
“It is a candid shot that I took in February 2020 in the backyard of Casa Mila in Barcelona. I was lucky that they were looking at me at this moment. I guess they were wondering about what this guy is doing?”
Gessler has a visual voice, but then he is also a film director and cinematographer which probably contributes to the way he tends to compose his photographs.
Admittedly he is not your usual street photographer, but he doesn’t have to be. Above all he is an intriguing cameraman who searches the confines of everyday existence for meaning and purpose while attempting to understand our place in the universe.
Maybe that is why he plays around with angles and points of view?
“I look for strong contrast and graphic architectural compositions with a human element,” he explains. “But I am also attracted to humans and scenes in which humans interact. I try to get as close as possible, but if I see a chance to capture a wider scene within a graphic composition I go for it”
The Berlin-based photographer has travelled. When we spoke he related the story of when he and his wife Helin hitch-hiked from Berlin to Istanbul.
I have seen the trailer they made for their on-the-road documentary. A montage of people they met on the way and spoke to during a journey which took them through several countries including Slovakia, Hungary and North Macedonia on their way to Turkey.
He still flits 2179 km (1354 miles) between Berlin (Germany) and Istanbul (Turkey) often via other Eastern European cities like Budapest (Hungary).
Wherever he goes he is looking, watching, waiting. Eventually He leads us into a curious street photographic world with all the aforementioned architecture, people, light and dazzling patterns.
Copyright ⓒ Jan Gessler
The man turning toward the lens looks slightly startled. I want to call him, for some unknown reason, Alex? He looks mean like a gangster – which might be unfair – in his smart suit, sunglasses, and marbled face.
‘Are you lookin’ at me?’
Goffman called it civil inattention. By that he means the way we go about our everyday life, deep in our own thoughts, immersed in our own little bubble worlds, hardly noticing anyone or anything as we shift ground and move from destination to destination.
It is the street photographer that disrupts that focus.
I find it ironic that the man in Gessler’s photo looks like a prisoner confined within the geometric patterns of the architecture that surrounds him – those lines and intricate squares, oblongs and grid patterns above his head – maybe, once again, there is a metaphor for the desired freedoms of life and the demands of getting and keeping a job to pay the bills?
I often talk about how each of us interprets photographs in our own way. How we might be at variance with the intention of the photographer. So for me the strength of Jan Gessler’s work IS his narrative. We are pulled into each frame to wander around and work out the story.
Copyright ⓒ Jan Gessler
Gessler offers a universe of possibilities like the simple stare of a bemused train traveller.
“I just woke up,” he remembered. “My wife was sitting behind me with my daughter sleeping on her lap. We were on the way to Kadikoy (an older residential area of Istanbul), where my wife had lived for ten years.
“I like the idea of using the strap as a frame inside the frame, which is sub-framing. I took one shot through all the straps around us but this… shot with the person looking at the camera is my favourite. He was wondering why this guy was taking photos of all the straps?”
This, for me, is a cinematographer at work, measuring, thinking, calculating, looking for an edge to give that single frame of photography life and vibrancy, a moment he captures as his subject glances at him.
It emerges from a lifetime of looking of seeing and of capturing life on film.
But where did this all start Jan?
“When I was twelve years old I helped my mother in her darkroom,” he told me of the start of his photographic journey. “Cropping images and seeing them appearing gradually on paper got me. The cropping process taught me how different framing can completely change the impact of an image on viewers.
“The moment that the image appeared on the paper was magical. I wanted to take my own shots and she gave me her old Pentax with a 28 and an 85 mm lens. I used this set-up for more than ten years from that day on. First, it was experimenting and later, it has become my job.”
Copyright ⓒ Jan Gessler
In one stark image a woman stands and looks out across the Bosphorus (often known as the Strait of Istanbul). For me this is a beautifully framed shot that brilliantly embraces that ‘decisive moment’. We see her from behind, the dark, rippling waters ahead of her, and we immediately think : Who is she? What is she thinking? What is she searching for?
“This shot means ‘Fernweh’” he starts and then goes on to say that he thinks that the word does not exist in English.
But it does, Jan, it means wanderlust.
“It would mean,” he continues. “Far away, pain, maybe wanderlust?”
Yes…
“While passing by,” he is telling me. “I was attracted to how she is embracing [or] holding herself. I also like the way the wind makes her clothes fly. It was taken in Üsküdar, Istanbul. A…religious district.”
So what drives Jan Gessler.
“I am a big fan of…Bauhaus design and architecture,” he explains. “To look at other photographers’ works also inspires me. The first edition of the 20th Century Photography (book) from Taschen was my only photobook until two years ago. I like many photographers from this book.
“For example the clean compositions of Fan Ho, Karl Hugo Schmoltz, Arnold Newman and Kishin Shinoyama ; the POV from Alexander Rodtschenko, Ernst Haas and Edward Stiechen ; as well as the smart humorous human street shots from Robert Doisneau, Henri Carter – Bresson and Rene Maltête.”
Jan Gessler tells me that his favoured way of working on the street is to move around, insisting that he is too impatient to hang about waiting for fate to play its part.
“I love hunting for new perspectives,” he says. “Rather than fishing and waiting for something to happen.”
Copyright ⓒ Jan Gessler
A woman sits on a bench and apart from her face and neck and hands – and, of course, the bench itself – everything else in this photograph is drenched in darkness.
“She was sitting calmly in this position for several minutes in front of a dark wall,” Jan revealed. “It relaxed me to see her. Later I worked on the background to eliminate some elements and convert them to black.”
Street photography, Jan tells me thoughtfully, relaxes him and also inspires his work as a cinematographer.
Jan Gessler frames existence in black and white. This, for me is the strength of his photographs, their stark reflection of life in tones and lines and designs.
Copyright ⓒ Jan Gessler
Yeah, of course they are cinematic and dramatic. Are the couple in the tunnel in love? Have they just had an argument?
Copyright ⓒ Jan Gessler
As they cross can we hear the noise of the traffic around them, the sound of the city? But we also feel that something is just about to happen and right at that moment.
But they will forever be taking that journey across the road, and we will be forever waiting for that, ‘something’, to happen.
Gessler is an intriguing, almost enigmatic presence in the street photography universe. There is no denying he is different, perhaps more experimental than most street photographers, certainly more testing of the great debate around photographic truth.
At the end of the day you can’t deny he is an extremely talented, accomplished shooter.
Copyright ⓒ Jan Gessler
Copyright ⓒ Jan Gessler
*For street work Jan uses Canon digital cameras with Sigma Art lenses, while he employs a Fuji GFX for portraits. When he was shooting analogue film he used Pentax and Leica cameras. His favourite focal lengths for street photography are 14mm, 24mm and sometimes 50mm, he doesn’t use zoom lenses.
For Jan’s Cinematography & photography Services visit his Website
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And Check out his Flickr Feed
2 Comments
Hello,
This short blog post and the photos are really great and beautiful。In my opinion, the principle of photography, can be said to be very simple, can also be said to be very complex. Generally the so-called photo, in fact, only press the shutter that moment, the light left in the film. A photographer’s work is naked, that is, you can tell from a photographer’s work what kind of person he is; And then what kind of aesthetic and trade-offs he has. photography still has its irreplaceable, it is still very different from painting in essence; A movie is a dynamic, flowing picture that tells a clear story; Photography it is flat, and then they two forms of watch is not the same, brings a person feeling also is not the same, the dynamic video it is a kind of experience, let you feel is real, then you will see it flows that every second of different images, images of 24 frames per second, and photography is one by one picture, you see, and went in after, You can stare at it, and then the good work is that you are staring, and you belong to a kind of stillness, and then the film is kind of pulling away. That’s why through photography, we can connect with the world at a deeper level.
kind regards
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