September 12 | 12 – 1pm
Jason Langer’s moody, cinematic photographs of Berlin are rich with echoes of trauma and resilience. His personal journey — from childhood in Israel to Buddhist studies and artistic confrontation in Germany — is a rare, poetic lens on history. This moving exhibit dives into the intergenerational imprint of the Holocaust and how photography can be both witness and salve.
Join us on Friday, September 12 from 12-1pm for an intimate tour of the exhibition led by Langer, who also curated the show.
This program is presented as part of Berlin: A Jewish Ode to the Metropolis.
About Curator
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.
Jason Langer’s Work
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 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).
Jason Langer Today
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.