Long Exposure Photography
Michael Wesely
Germany 1997–ongoing
Since 1997, German artist Michael Wesely has produced a series of extremely long exposure photographs using handmade repurposed analog cameras and capturing time periods of minutes, days, months, even years in a single image.
He is best known for his documents of urban reconstruction projects, notably the Daimler-Chrysler building at the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (1997), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (“Open Shutter Project 2001–2004”), and, currently, the City Palace in Berlin (2014–2019). Here, the passing of time and the gradual transformation of the urban landscape is represented in layers, like the growth rings of a tree.
Shorter exposure times are used for his still lives and portraits; in the latter, the camera points at the sitter for several minutes, echoing Andy Warhol’s single take Screen Test films of the 1960s. In fact, the durational nature of Wesely’s work – collapsing the movement into a still image – might be considered a cinematic form of photography, yet it also contains overtones of the French photographer Eugène Atget, whose documentation of Old Paris was captured through ghostly images of a city in transition. Like Atget, Wesely’s approach is a dynamic demonstration of Andre Bazin’s assertion in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” that photography embalms time (Bazin 1967). (Kim Knowles)
Michael Wesely, born 1963 in Munich, lives and works in Berlin.
References
Andre Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema? Volume 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).
Sarah Hermanston Meister, Michael Wesely: Open Shutter (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005).