About : Sander Meisner

Info:
I am a self-taught photographer (Amsterdam, 1979) living and working in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
I photograph the sleeping infrastructure of the urban environment, shooting in the middle of the night I often going out at ten or eleven, photographing until sunrise. I photograph when everybody is asleep, and sometimes it's so quiet it is as if the city itself is asleep.
I tend to go to the outer regions of a city, to the more industrial and commercial areas to shoot. These areas are similar in any city. That's part of the reason why they interest me so much, everybody recognises them for what they are, yet nobody likes them.
By night, people often feel a lot of places become quiet sinister, but if you look deeper, the night creates a lot of beauty in places that aren't considered beautiful. The colors, shadows and transformation of texture and geometric appearance of a lot of places at night can dramatically increase their beauty. People fear the dark, but when photographed with long shutter speeds the dark turns out to be both very colorful and pretty.
I am represented by Brandt gallery in Amsterdam.
- Sander Meisner, 2011

Capturing his compositions using a camera from the 1950’s (namely a Mamiya C33 twin lens reflex medium format film camera), Meisner employs an analogue technique in his photography. Unusual as it may be in our high-tech world of supercomputers, enormously equipped digital cameras and miraculous photo editing programs, his old-fashioned approach may seem outdated but nonetheless, it confirms the artist’s originality and unique gift at identifying and recording the perfect picture at first attempt. Meisner’s method stands in a surprising contrast to the subject matter of his photography: artificial lights, shadows, concrete buildings and architectural elements, industrial terrains, construction sites, deserted spaces – all symbols of the modern urban environment of the 21st century. In his carefully traced out compositions, Meisner often achieves the complete decontextualization of the captured object and environment, whereby his compositions take on a whole new set of meanings and aesthetic qualities, reduced into a forest of geometric symbols. In Meisner’s streamlined photographs, void of any sign of a heart-beat, the presence of human existence is only implied through the man-made elements, transporting our depth of contemplation to deeper philosophical levels.
- Judit Boszan, Eurartproject, 2011

Sander Meisner is a night walker, venturing out into the city discovering colorful beauty in the desolate corners of the gray man made structures. He exposes the sleeping infrastructure of the urban environment. Gifted with a feeling for composition and detail, Sander is turning these usually overlooked corners into objects of desire. The lack of light and extremely long exposure of the photographic film add a secondary effect; any interaction of human movement becomes totally invisible. Therefore, his pictures make us wonder what of this beauty will remain if human life would suddenly disappear. How long will infrastructure last when not regularly maintained and when will nature take over?
- Gianni Hilgemann, 2x2projects gallery, 2009