Lower Le Fenil Gallery
Michael Lange
Wald
published at 25/06/2018
Michael Lange’s photographs draw us into the bewitching forest world that plays such a key role in the collective imagination, in Germany most of all.
“The forest’s figurative presence is essentially apprehended as an area of psychical refuge where it is possible to survive the desires and fears of childhood. (...) What is there of concrete significance that we search for when we enter a forest? (...) Michael spent three years wandering the forests of Germany at dusk, in semidarkness. Led by his intuition, he located each place of refuge, where children’s’ imaginations blossom along with nature’s gifts, and returned with some incredible visual impressions. They testify to the perilous, long delayed journey of the adult “me” to finally reach the spot sought for so many long years by the child’s soul.
Michael Lange’s forest scenes are timeless images of nature, seemingly as mythical as they are real. His motifs are imbued with a profound appeasement and sublimity. His photographs stand out because they hide a secret. They draw on the dying or emerging light to fashion an almost tender concentrate from its rays. There is frequent basic questioning as to the origin of the appeasement that shows through in the photographs. (...) In Michael Lange’s photographic depictions, an artistic strategy is powerfully present, a result of such vigilant experience. It might be compared with what Germany’s romantic poets referred to as “Waldeinsamkeit”, the feeling of being alone in the woods.” Christoph Schaden
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Michael LANGE
GERMANY
A self-taught photographer who started putting his knowhow into practice in the late 1970s, Michael Lange was regarded in Germany as one of the top magazine photographers of the last 30 years. Most of his work was for Stern, Geo, Art, Der Spiegel, Time, Newsweek and Fortune magazine, and as contracted photographer for Germany Manager Magazin. Since the late 1990s, he has devoted himself to personal artistic projects.
