(1963, Munich, Germany)

Michael Wesely is a German art photographer known for his photos of cities, buildings, landscapes, and flower still lifes taken with a special ultra-long exposure technique. Michael Wesely lives and works in Berlin.

From 1986 to 1988, Michael Wesely attended the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie in Munich, before studying at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts with Heribert Sturm and James Reineking.

Wesely used a self-made pinhole camera to photograph scenes of rapid and deep development, such as the reconstruction of the Berlin Potsdamer Platz in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1990s. On the contrary, he later did Landscape images from East Germany and the United States showing wide fields and the sky above. During the reconstruction of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), Wesely took photos recording the change in architecture. This was called the Open Shutter project, which was shown at MoMA in 2004. Together with Lina Kim, she later photographed the Brazilian capital, Brasilia.

Wesely’s works deal with the subject of time and the change that takes place over time. Due to the extremely long exposure and the special light bulb it uses, less moving elements dominate your images, while moving ones will later be seen as transparent figures or the contours of newly erected buildings overlap. The images “reveal the passage of time by showing the changing horizon, the skeletons of cranes, the rise of new buildings and the disappearance of others. Sun rays, the residue of changing positions (land of tithe and sun) also it is evident, like a palimpsest of seasons. ” Everything that happened on the scene during the exhibition (for weeks, months or even up to two or three years) will be seen in a single image. Wesely’s photographs have been described as a metaphor for the change of Berlin after 1989 because “both surprisingly energetic and ghostly and uninhabited. This formal paradox aptly describes Berlin, which had only been unified for ten years at the time images were taken. comment on the passage of time. “

Publicaciones

Vereinte Versicherung AG (ed.): Michael Wesely, American landscape. Storms. Munich. 2000.
Galerie Fahnemann. Autor Philippe van Cauteren (eds.): Ostdeutschland = East Germany. König. Köln. 2004.
Time works. Schirmer Mosel. Munich. 2010.
Hubertus von Amelunxen, Ludwig Seyfarth, Dorothee von Windheim: Michael Wesely Portraits 1988–2013. Distanz. Berlin. 2013.