Elger Esser's photographic works seem to have fallen out of time, as if they were taken in the early years of photografie in the 19th century. But appearances are deceptive: it is a long way from the old photographic art to C-print, not to mention the technical inventions of Esser himself - for example, in his use of silver-plated copper plates and shellacfirnis. Born in Stuttgart, he had the pleasure of 'guesting' at the Villa Massimo in Rome as a young boy: His father, Manfred Esser, who with Max Bense and Reinhard Döhl was one of the fathers of the concrete Stuttgart School, had taken up his fellowship there in 1969. Perhaps the photographic gaze was shaped there; even as a child, one will experience that in Rome one always lives in at least three time periods - antiquity, Renaissance, modernity. The yearning view of Romania, especially France, was certainly influenced by his French mother, a press photographer: Esser lives in Düsseldorf, but the neighboring country may well be considered his artistic adopted home. This is obvious given his retrospective view and his preoccupation with photografie history - France is, after all, the country of origin for photographers. Esser owns one of the largest private collections of around 25,000 historical photographic postcards. From this, he creates a photografisch oeuvre of mostly monumental proportions, in the style of these postcards, some of which are also templates for his own heliogravures. This effect alone is grandiose. Esser does not seek out the tourist highlights, but rather river landscapes, bridges, the vastness of the province: a lot of water, a lot of sky - and in between, almost dreamy houses, castles, stretches of nature. This work is removed from time, since without a legend the viewer would not be able to tell when the photograph was taken - 1860, 1900, or 2020. And the work also seems removed from place, since even the concrete references in the title are put into perspective, since they compete not with photos from travel guides but with the fictive place of Combray, the place where Marcel Proust had his epochal novel In Search of Lost Time begin. This is the unmistakable characteristic of Esser's work. In their sepia tones, his photografies breathe this unreal flair of the old days, as if it were a matter of translating Proust's novel pictorially. With this aesthetic of the essentially unspectacular, Esser makes a singular appearance; within the legendary but rather matter-of-fact "Düsseldorf School" around Bernd and Hilla Becher, he is an exotic alongside Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth. Esser knows how to capture the magic of a place on the surface of elaborate image carriers. "In my work I live in another time" - he revives it for the viewer, in all its beauty. This time, however, can only be preserved through its re-creation in the work of art, which is how one could paraphrase the photographer's credo.