Michael Wesely

Michael Wesely (born 1963 in Munich) 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.

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. 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.

Reception Wesely's works deal with the subject of time and the change that takes place over time. or three years ) will be seen in one single picture. 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."

Scholarships 1995: Scholarship by the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD for the Netherlands 1996: Work scholarship of the Stiftung Kunstfonds at Bonn 1999: Scholarship for United States by the Free State of Bavaria

Selected publications Vereinte Versicherung AG (ed.): Michael Wesely, American landscape. Storms. Munich. 2000. Galerie Fahnemann. Autor Philippe van Cauteren (eds.): Ostdeutschland = East Germany. König. Köln. 2004. Time works. Schirmer Mosel. Munich. 2010. Hubertus von Amelunxen, Ludwig Seyfarth, Dorothee von Windheim: Michael Wesely Portraits 1988–2013. Distanz. Berlin. 2013.