Michael Wesely

Last updated
Michael Wesely
Born1963 (age 5859)
Occupation Art photographer
Known forSpecial ultra-long exposure technique

Michael Wesely (born 1963 in Munich) [1] is a German art photographer who is best known for his photos of cities, buildings, landscapes, and still lives of flowers taken with a special ultra-long exposure technique. Michael Wesely lives and works in Berlin.

Contents

Life

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.

Works

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. [2] In contrast, he later made pictures of still East German and American landscapes showing wide fields and the sky above. [3] During the reconstruction of New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Wesely took photos recording the change in architecture. [4] [5] This was called the Open Shutter project, shown at the MoMA in 2004. [6] Together with Lina Kim, he later photographed the Brazilian capital Brasília. [7]

Reception

Wesely's works deal with the subject of time and the change that takes place over time. [2] 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. The pictures "reveal the passage of time by showing the changing skyline, the skeletons of cranes. the rise of new buildings, and the disappearance of others. Beams of sunlight, the residue of the ever-changing positions (tithe earth and sun, are also evident, like a palimpsest of seasons". [2] Everything that ever happened on the scene during exposure (during weeks, months, or even up to two [2] or three years [8] ) will be seen in one single picture. [9] Wesely's photographs have been described as a metaphor on the change of Berlin after 1989 because "at once strikingly energetic and ghostly and uninhabited. This formal paradox aptly describes Berlin, which had only been unified for ten years at the time the images were taken. In that way, the photographs offer a larger commentary on time's passage." [2]

Scholarships

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

Wim Wenders German filmmaker

Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders is a German filmmaker, playwright, author, and photographer. He is a major figure in New German Cinema. Among many honors, he has received three nominations for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature: for Buena Vista Social Club (1999), about Cuban music culture; Pina (2011), about the contemporary dance choreographer Pina Bausch; and The Salt of the Earth (2014), about Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado.

Georg Baselitz German artist

Georg Baselitz is a German painter, sculptor and graphic artist. In the 1960s he became well known for his figurative, expressive paintings. In 1969 he began painting his subjects upside down in an effort to overcome the representational, content-driven character of his earlier work and stress the artifice of painting. Drawing from myriad influences, including art of Soviet era illustration art, the Mannerist period and African sculptures, he developed his own, distinct artistic language.

Gerhard Richter German visual artist

Gerhard Richter is a German visual artist. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary German artists and several of his works have set record prices at auction.

Garry Winogrand American street photographer

Garry Winogrand was an American street photographer, known for his portrayal of U.S. life and its social issues, in the mid-20th century. Photography curator, historian, and critic John Szarkowski called Winogrand the central photographer of his generation.

Michael Ruetz works as artist and author. He is a German photographer.

Thomas Ruff German photographer

Thomas Ruff is a German photographer who lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. He has been described as "a master of edited and reimagined images".

Günther Förg German painter

Günther Förg was a German painter, graphic designer, sculptor and photographer. His abstract style was influenced by American abstract painting.

Stephen Shore American photographer

Stephen Shore is an American photographer known for his images of banal scenes and objects in the United States, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography. His books include Uncommon Places (1982) and American Surfaces (1999), photographs that he took on cross-country road trips in the 1970s.

Albert Watson (photographer) Scottish photographer

Albert Watson OBE is a Scottish fashion, celebrity and art photographer. He has shot over 100 covers of Vogue and 40 covers of Rolling Stone magazine since the mid-1970s, and has created major advertising campaigns for clients such as Prada, Chanel and Levis. Watson has also taken some well-known photographs, from the portrait of Steve Jobs that appeared on the cover of his biography, a photo of Alfred Hitchcock holding a plucked goose, and a portrait of a nude Kate Moss taken on her 19th birthday.

James Welling is an American artist, photographer and educator living in New York City. He attended Carnegie-Mellon University where he studied drawing with Gandy Brodie and at the University of Pittsburgh where he took modern dance classes. Welling transferred to the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California in 1971 and received a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. in the School of Art. At Cal Arts, he studied with John Baldessari, Wolfgang Stoerchle and Jack Goldstein.

Mariah Robertson is an American photographer. She lives in New York City.

Michael Reisch is a German artist and photographer. Reisch exhibited nationally and internationally. His works are included in collections worldwide, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA and National Gallery of Scotland Edinburgh, Scotland. His works combine aspects of documentary photography, painting and sculpture. He lives in Düsseldorf.

Bernd Schwarzer

Bernd Schwarzer is a German artist born in Weimar, Thuringia, Germany. Schwarzer's work deals with the subject of Europe, the reunification of East and West Germany, and human rights.

Anouk Kruithof Dutch artist

Anouk Kruithof is a Dutch artist whose exhibitions and books merge social, conceptual, photographic, performance and video. She is best known for her artist's book Happy Birthday to You. Kruithof has had published, or self-published, a number of books of her work, which has also been exhibited in various solo and group shows including at Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography; both the Photography Jury Grand Prize and the Photo Global scholarship from Hyères International Fashion and Photography Festival, and the Charlotte Köhler Prize from Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds. She is based in New York.

Sabine Hornig is a German visual artist and photographer who lives and works in Berlin. Her work in photography, sculpture, and site-specific installation art is known for her interpretations of modernist architecture and contemporary urban life. Her work has appeared in solo exhibitions throughout the world, including Double Transparency at Art Unlimited Basel in Switzerland (2014) and Projects 78 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2003), and in numerous group exhibitions at institutions like the J.Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and ICA London.

Cornelia Schleime

Cornelia Schleime is a German painter, performer, filmmaker and author. Born in East Berlin under the GDR, she studied painting and graphic arts at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts before becoming a member of the underground art scene.

Mat Hennek

Mat Hennek is a German fine art photographer.

Rudi Tröger is a German painter and university professor. From 1967 to 1992 he was a professor for painting art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.

Peter Johnston Galassi is an American writer, curator, and art historian working in the field of photography. His principal fields are photography and nineteenth-century French art.

Adam Magyar is a photographer and video artist.

References

  1. If not noted otherwise, all biographical information is taken from Michael Wesely (German, 1963), Biography on artnet. Retrieved on 8 May 2014.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Rachel Somerstein: "Le Mois De La Photo a Montreal: September 5 – October 5, 2013" Archived 10 October 2017 at the Wayback Machine . Afterimage 41, no. 4. 2014.
  3. Michael Wesely's pictures of East German and American landscapes at Fahnemann projects, Berlin. Retrieved on 20 April 2014.
  4. Matt Nestor: Rare Photos of NYC's Museums Under Construction . In: Gizmodo. 4 January 2014. Retrieved on 20 April 2014.
  5. Michael Wesely's pictures as seen in the MoMA collection, retrieved on 20 April 2014.
  6. Jérôme Delgado: Le nouveau MoMA: toujours la pretention d'etre au sommet.(New York; expansion plans of New York Museum of Modern Art) . 1 March 2005. Retrieved on 20 April 2014 on Highbeam Research via The Wikipedia Library.
  7. Niklas Maak: Raum ohne Schatten . Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 4 September 2011. Retrieved on 20 April 2014 (book review of: Lina Kim, Michael Wesely: Arquivo Brasília. Cosac & Naify. 2010).
  8. Michael Wesely Archived 21 April 2014 at the Wayback Machine . Walter Storms Galerie. Retrieved on 20 April 2014.
  9. Guilherme Wisnik: Michael Wesely. Langzeitbelichtung und die trübe Dimension der kontemporären Stadt Archived 10 October 2017 at the Wayback Machine . Darmstädter Tage der Fotografie. 2010. Retrieved on 20 April 2014.