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Elger Esser (b. 1967) works mainly in the medium of photography and is one of the most important members of the Becher School from Düsseldorf. Early in his career, he started exploring historic landscape photography, which has continued to have a huge influence on his work. For the most part, the analogue images that he subsequently subjects to further processing are taken near the sea or rivers, most of them in France. Often, his images are dominated by imposing cloud formations. The volume Elger Esser: Die engen Wasser presents more than sixty depictions of river landscapes created by Esser over the last twenty-five years. Again and again, the artist traces the literary trail of famous writers such as Proust, Maupassant, and Flaubert. Several of the images show the Èvre, a tributary of the Loire, which the French author Julien Gracq (1910-2007) described in his essay collection Die engen Wasser. Selected passages from his writings are presented alongside Essers’s postromantic landscapes.