Michael Wesely’s cities
Since 1994 Michael Wesely has been taking photos with long exposures. For instance, with up to two-year long exposures, he documented the construction being done at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin between 1997 and 1999. The sense of space and time captured in these pictures is remarkable: sequential events appear as one continuous action.
And if you’re in NYC, you can check out the Open Shutter exhibit at The Museum of Modern Art which showcases his long-exposure photos of the new museum construction (via)
The Metropolis series is a collaboration between Michael Wesely and Kalle Laar that began in 1999 in Los Angeles and continued in Sao Paulo in 2001.
“Vinyl Picture Discs function as their mutual platform, which combine the background sounds of the respective sites with the corresponding long-term exposures of them. The result is an acoustic-visual portrait of each metropolis - twenty-minute long ‘documentary films’ so to speak, that turn the events of a specific site into a single, visually distorted image, while the background sounds accompany it in real time.”
In addition to long-term exposure photography, Wesely has experimented with his own version of the camera obscura and the resulting pictures play with the presences and absences of city dwelling. In Salzburg, he photographed tourist attractions in a way that deletes the architectural attraction, leaving only a frame. And his pinhole camera photos of Berlin, Madrid and Rome leave only glimpses, or whitish shadows, of the people passing by.
