PhOTO: JESSICA LANGE

Photography is a great counterpoint to filmmaking, because it’s a private, solitary experience. It’s like writing or painting; it’s something you can do on your own.

Jessica Lange with her Leica camera
PHOTO: SIMON CHAPUT

For almost 50 years, Jessica Lange has been spending her life in front of the camera and it has been more than 20 years that she has picked up the camera herself. Ever since, her photographs have spoken for themselves aiming the actress’ unflustered gaze not at spectators in front of a big screen, but at the world around her. In her photography she once again proves the same clever, silent, and yet always powerful gift of observation that admirers have come to find and love in her acting.

Lange started taking her first pictures in the 1990s on the Leica M6 that her long-standing partner Sam Shepard had brought back home for as a souvenir from Germany. Her first subjects were her children, her friends, her family. She quickly started capturing an intimacy that you can also feel in her newer photographs. 

In the 1960s Lange studied photography at the University of Minnesota, where she met fellow photographer Paco Grande, with whom she quickly quit her studies and took to traveling to Mexico together in a minivan instead. The Highway 61 that once led her there became the canvas for her first photographic project 20 years later.  

“The impulse of taking a photo is an emotional reaction” for her, a belief that strongly shapes her approach to this artform: Whatever her lens catches remains untouched, is developed and printed just as it came. To put it in her words, her photographs are never about composition, never about abstraction or documentary observation: They’re about a moment and that moment only. 

A selection of these moments is now being presented for the first time in Germany. The exhibition Through her Lens showcases a variety of photographs, that she herself selected for the museum. They display echoes of the most diverse phases of her career in photography – from her two last photo books Highway 61 (2019) and Dérive (2023). 

In the latter, Lange explores a deserted New York during the Covid-19 pandemic. Amidst the lockdown rules, Lange encounters the last lost souls of her city, catches its ever-so crowded monuments empty and calm in a powerful silence. In this ghost town, she finds and unveils the untamed pulse of her city. Once more, Lange showcases her unparalleled gift to capture seemingly fleeting and irrelevant moments in a precise and emotional manner that moves spectators to their core. A new documentary film by director Benjamin Alfonsi will soon delve deeper into her photographic gaze. 

The exhibition will open with a vernissage at the Deutsches Theatermuseum on July 1, 2024 and can be visited until September 8, 2024.

The museum is open daily (except Mondays) from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., admission costs 5 euros.