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Michael Wesely

Portraits 1988-2013

Malerische Bewegungsunschärfe

With his extreme time exposures, Michael Wesely (b. Munich, 1963; lives and works in Berlin) has found his own way to represent change. Among his works are imposing studies of cut flowers in a vase, from budding blossom to wilting, as well as fruit ripening on a plate. But Wesely’s plate camera also documented the construction of entire buildings such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York (August 7, 2001 – June 7, 2004), or the DaimlerChrysler complex at Potsdamer Platz, Berlin (April 4, 1997 – June 4, 1999), in exposures that lasted up to thirty-four months.

Wesely’s practice is the opposite of a photography fixated on the critical “moment.” His pictures transmit no more than a few fragments of reality; his mode of perception is defined by the idea of shifting images into the mind of the beholder. This book presents more than two hundred portraits of different people from Wesely’s personal and professional acquaintance made between 1988 and 2013. Most of them were taken with an exposure time of five minutes (in a few cases, up to twenty minutes). The resulting pictures say more about a human being than a shot captured in a fraction of a second for which the photographer determines the moment the picture registers by pressing the shutter release. They record a period of time during which the sitters ultimately create their own portraits, revealing their true characters through their demeanor in front of the camera.

With essays by Hubertus von Amelunxen and Ludwig Seyfarth.