Spacial Recognition

In response to humanity’s impact on the planet and the resulting climate change, San Francisco photographer Thomas Heinser appears to place people, places, and objects on the same conceptual plane—each struggling to exist within a shared moment in time.

His recent exhibition at Wessling Contemporary, Zwischenraum: The Realm of Tension between Humanity and the Environment, underscores this idea. Zwischenraum, German for “the space between,” becomes for Heinser a measure of time—the time it takes for a person, a landscape, or an object to blossom, deteriorate, and regenerate, and how each process affects the others. “They are related,” he says.

The show includes years’ worth of aerial photographs documenting the devastating, yet strangely beautiful effects of droughts and forest fires on California’s terrain, alongside the painterly abstractions of evaporating Bay Area salt ponds. Portraits of young and old subjects, taken over time, suggest a parallel aging process—faces weathered like landscapes. During the pandemic, Heinser began repurposing strips of VHS tape from his old movie library, capturing their tangled magnetic, time-worn surfaces.

Once a commercial photographer, Heinser turned his lens on the City about a decade ago while on assignment for Levi’s, discovering a new perspective from a helicopter. “I got hooked on seeing San Francisco from a distance,” he says. “There was Zwischenraum—room between me and the subject.”

That distance, both literal and metaphorical, led him to track recurring subjects: fire-scorched forests, drought-hardened land, and the quiet erosion of time. “It might all disappear,” Heinser notes. “So I wanted to document it. But I’m not interested in making disaster porn.”