Pier 9

This photographic base was shot in San Francisco, California

Printed on Fine Art Hahnemühle Hemp Natural Line 290 g/m2.

Each print comes signed and numbered. 

Unframed. With a small white border. Send in a tube.

Print size 90 x 75 cm - Edition of 10

Print size 60 x 50 cm - Edition of 10.

Print size 30 x 25 cm - Edition of 10.
Print size 10,5 x 14,8 cm (DIN A6) - Edition of 100.

Thomas Haensgen’s Pier 9 is a quiet epic, a meditative choreography where massive cargo ships and a small formation of birds converge—an encounter as improbable as it is inevitable, like your neighbor suddenly speaking fluent Latin. On the left, the container ship pushes into the composition like a determined accountant, while the birds on the right take charge of the “department of poetic whimsy.” The ships follow the waves, the birds follow the wind—and yet they share the same horizon.

The pastel tones of the sky evoke Turner wielding his brush after a long-haul flight and five hours of jet lag. But Haensgen goes beyond: his work embraces the minimalist rigor of Donald Judd’s conceptual art, fused with the fleeting poetry of Hiroshige’s woodblock prints. It’s an aesthetic so meticulously considered that it feels accidental—the strange moment when you find exactly what you didn’t know you needed in your fridge.

The birds fly in a perfect line, like an Excel chart with a soul, while the container ship quietly reminds us of the industrial burdens of the world. Between these poles unfolds the essence of Pier 9: a tension between heaviness and lightness, between routine and freedom. It’s a piece that celebrates the understated beauty of the everyday while asking why the simplicity of the sky sometimes strikes us harder than any dramatic gesture.

What Haensgen achieves here is no simple documentation of a scene. It’s a quiet manifesto—a plea for the beauty of small transitions, the things that happen when we aren’t looking but later realize were the most important moments. Pier 9 is a reminder that even the mundane holds a sliver of infinity, hidden between the shadows of containers and the wings of birds.