June 11 | Event from 6 – 7:30pm; doors open at 5:30pm
Join curator, artist, and photographer Jason Langer as he discusses his exhibition and book, Berlin: A Jewish Ode to the Metropolis. The program will also include a brief walkthrough of the exhibition led by the curator, as well as book signings.
This program is presented as part of Berlin: A Jewish Ode to the Metropolis. The exhibition is open June 8 through October 26, 2025.
About the Exhibition Berlin: A Jewish Ode to the Metropolis
Langer’s Berlin project is deeply personal and the product of a five-year reconciliation of the impressions of the Holocaust that were seeded in the photographer as a 10-year-old living on a kibbutz in Israel. Over five years, Langer was able to undo the fearful impressions about Germany that had been instilled in his mind as a child. His photography shows that Berlin is a city of dichotomies with symbols of division and reunification everywhere.
About Jason Langer’s Book Berlin: A Jewish Ode to the Metropolis
The book, available for sale in the Ron Tonkin Family Museum Shop and during the program, consists of 135 black-and-white photographs, accompanied by essays that explore the city’s dark past and its brightness today. Langer’s photographs are formally composed, rich and moody, favoring darker tones. They lend a poetic sensibility to both classic views of Berlin as well as smaller, hidden places which often tell specific, individual stories.
About Jason Langer
Born in 1967 in Tucson, Arizona, photographer Jason Langer makes work underpinned by Buddhist philosophy. Graduating with a BA in Photography from the University of Oregon in 1989, his first major project, Shadow, explored existential ideas relating to the fragility of the human body. In the 1990s, he made Secret City, a series of night photographs of distant, anonymous men in New York, whose faces were darkened or obscured to represent egolessness.
In 2007, Langer started a decade-long project titled Figures, featuring studies of strangers inspired by Buddhist and Jungian teachings on masculine and feminine principles. In the same year, he began photographing couples making love, exploring the Buddhist aspects of the mind in union. This work was exhibited as The Diamond and the Lotus in 2012. Langer has published four books to date: Secret City (2006, Nazraeli Press), Possession (2013, Nazraeli Press), a mid-career retrospective titled Twenty Years (Radius Books, 2015), and Berlin (2022, Kerber Verlag).
Langer’s work has been exhibited by institutions such as Benrubi Gallery (NYC), Kopeikin Gallery (Los Angeles), and ClampArt, (NYC) and supported by grants and awards from the Ford Family Foundation, The Oregon Arts Commission, PX3 Prix de la Photographie, Paris, the Joy of Giving Something Foundation, The Wood Institute, Madrid Foto, and the Palm Beach Photographic Centre’s Fotofusion Rising Star Award. His images are held in the permanent collections of Yale University Art Gallery, Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, Sir Elton John, Sir Mick Jagger, and International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, among others, and are represented by CLAMP (NYC), Galerie Esther Woerdehoff (Paris), and Gilman Contemporary (Idaho).
Langer taught photography at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco for more than a decade and currently teaches for Santa Fe Workshops, Medium San Diego, and is a faculty member of Photo Phlo. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and is currently working on two projects – Stumptown Portraits and Samsara: the Wheel of Life and Transcendence, which reflects the Buddhist cycle of birth, death, and rebirth following his father’s passing in 2019.