Michael Wesely

From 1986 to 1988, Michael Wesely attended the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie at Munich, before taking up studies at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts with Heribert Sturm and James Reineking. Wesely employed a self-made special pinhole camera for photographing scenes of profound and quick development such as the reconstruction of Berlin Potsdamer Platz in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1990s. In contrast, he later made pictures of still East German and American landscapes showing wide fields and the sky above. During the reconstruction of New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Wesely took photos recording the change in architecture. This was called the Open Shutter project, shown at the MoMA in 2004. Together with Lina Kim, he later photographed the Brazilian capital Brasília. 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 bulb he uses, those elements that move the least dominate his images, while those moving will later be seen as transparent figures or the outlines of newly erect buildings overlapping.