The Photographer Michael Lange
As a self-taught photographer, Michael Lange photographed for over three decades for magazines such as Stern / Spiegel / Geo / Art / Manager Magazin. Since the mid-1990s, his interest shifted toward personal projects, and since 2009, his focus has been entirely on independent series. In this division into freelance photography and commissioned work, Michael Lange's life's work resembles other archives preserved by the F.C. Gundlach Foundation from the photographers of the fotoform group of the early 1950s to Lange's companion Dirk Reinartz.
"My paintings speak of the longing for silence and peace, for depth and beauty, and the desire to lose oneself." (Michael Lange, 2015)
Michael Lange achieved his breakthrough at Stern in Hamburg in 1981 with a color reportage about craftsmen on the road. He subsequently photographed travel reports, covered science topics, and also photographed for companies such as Deutsche Bahn and BMW. Numerous artist portraits for Art are noteworthy. For Manager Magazin he created a completely new type of professional portrait: the shamelessly profit-oriented entrepreneur, board member or manager as a symbol of limitless neoliberalism. After co-founding the Fox-Reportagen agency, he became a member of the Visum photography agency. Michael Lange increasingly felt that he had already reached the peak of his career. At the same time, the end of the 1990s saw the beginning of a fundamental restructuring of the magazine landscape due to advancing digitalization. The financial crisis ultimately also meant that well-paid jobs for annual reports disappeared: it was these upheavals that gave Michael Lange the impetus to turn to independent series.
He first encountered this approach through the 2010 series LA DRIVE-BY. The title refers to the phrase 'drive-by shooting,' and thus to the quick, spontaneous photography from the car window, but also to the truly threatening atmosphere in the remote neighborhoods of Los Angeles. The result is a grim portrait of an inhospitable city. Inextricably linked to the motifs is the aesthetics of the film material, the black-and-white Polapan instant film and its unconventional processing. The images capture not only the passing world, but also the palpable tension between subject and photographer. The urban landscape reveals itself not as a road movie, but as a psychological profile of the photographer: "Driving through Los Angeles was like delving into myself, encountering my fear in dark, terrifying places. It was a constant struggle against inner resistance."
This approach proves to be key to the landscape series, which continued until 2025. For Lange, a successful landscape photograph always reflects a feeling, and as personal as this may initially seem, the relevance of his images lies in the photographer's subjective dialogue with his environment. WALD, FLUSS , COLD MOUNTAIN, and, until his death in January 2025, THE POND reflect the mood of our society, which can be characterized by the longing for pacification.
Time and again, Lange discovered new visual language in the process of artistic appropriation: whether in the struggle for color in the moment of fading or awakening light, in the creation of expressive image crops, in pointed black-and-white contrasts, or in sequential work. Since 2010, Michael Lange has made a name for himself in the photography and art world, significantly supported by Robert Morat and his gallery.
