Michael Wesely

(b. 1963, Munich,Germany)

Michael Wesely lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He is a keeper and a capturer of time. His photography does not aim for the fleeting instant or the dramatisation of the moment but its opposite, for the documentation of continuance layered and condensed into a single image, a collection of moments in motion. Wesely, using extremely long exposure times, stretches the photographic process to the limits of possibility and in so doing, gives us the opportunity of experiencing temporality and transformation in a uniquely compelling way.

Wesely uses special large format cameras to create his photographs, which are concerned with ideas of temporality and ephemera, and present still images that literally embody the passage of time. "Time is the vehicle I use to arrive at images and photos," he has explained. "The extreme length of exposure leads to a shift in perception. It's no longer the motif alone that counts-that is often a more invisible than visible, merely looming presence. But peripheral conditions such as light, movement, and other atmospheric elements emerge differently as focal points." Wesely has received several awards and honors for his work, including a 1995 scholarship by the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD to produce photographs in the Netherlands, and a scholarship by the Free State of Bavaria for work in the US in 1999. In 2004, he was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York to produce a large-scale project titled the Open Shutter Project and from 2014 - 2017 he worked with the Instituto Moreira Salles in Sao Paulo on the "Camera aberta" project, the new Museum of IMS in Sao Paulo.