Michael Wesely

When a Short Exposure Is Not Enough — Recording How Long a Subject Was There

Wesely studied at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie from 1986 to 1988 and later attended the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. His official biography also records studies at the Salzburg International Summer Academy with Verena von Gagern, Dorothee von Windheim, and Dieter Appelt^*1 In a 2004 WIRED article, he explained that he felt short shutter speeds could not adequately describe a subject, so he began testing longer exposures, extending them from seconds to minutes, hours, days, months, and eventually years^*23 In a 2026 interview, he likewise described photography as closer to an “invention” than a faithful copy of reality and reflected on his move away from the “decisive moment”^*10 With a short exposure, people, vehicles, and buildings all register as if they belonged to the same instant. As the exposure lengthens, what remains visible depends on how long each element occupied the same position. Wesely uses that difference to make duration, as well as appearance, part of the photograph’s information.

Berlin After Reunification — Photographing Potsdamer Platz as Construction Time

A defining example of Wesely’s method as urban history is Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, where large-scale redevelopment followed German reunification. In an exposure made with a fixed camera from March 1997 to December 1998, cranes, buildings, and temporary structures coexist at different densities, layering several phases of the city in one image^*6 The Mercedes-Benz Art Collection likewise places his extreme long exposures in direct relation to the transformation of Berlin after reunification^*21 A photograph made only after completion loses structures and empty intervals that vanished during redevelopment. By making the duration of construction itself a photographic condition, Wesely brought the pace of urban redevelopment into the image.

A Fixed Camera and a Single Negative — Refusing to Divide Construction into Stages

MoMA’s Open Shutter records the museum’s 2001–04 renovation from fixed positions, accumulating construction and demolition within individual exposures^*2 In the collection work 9 August 2001–2 May 2003, walls and structural frames from different stages occupy the same site as translucent layers, making it impossible to assign the photograph to a single moment^*3 According to WIRED, in the MoMA photograph exposed for thirty-four months, many workers and cranes disappeared because they remained in any one position only briefly, while structures visible for roughly one hundred days registered in the image^*23 The fixed camera and single negative keep the project from being divided into separate images of the old building, demolition, construction, and completion. At one set of coordinates, vanished walls, new framing, and the finished building overlap at densities determined by exposure time. Intermediate stages that would disappear from a conventional completion photograph remain visible in the same frame.

“Visual Archaeology” and John Cage — Relinquishing Control over the Final Image

In a 2026 interview, Wesely described his work as a form of “visual archaeology” that excavates layers of the past, and spoke of photography as closer to invention than faithful reproduction^*10 In the same conversation he referred to John Cage and described his acceptance of light and movement that cannot be fully predicted during an exposure. His official “Time Works” section likewise shows repeated projects in which the camera remains open for a set period from a predetermined position^*11 The photographer determines the camera position, when the exposure begins and ends, and how long it lasts. What appears or disappears within that interval is left to changes at the site.

1. Mai Demonstration — Five Minutes of Protest in One Exposure

1. Mai Demonstration, Potsdamer Straße, presented by Berlin’s Museum für Fotografie, compresses just five minutes—from 10:03 to 10:08 a.m. on May 1, 2008—into a single exposure^*5 The museum exhibited this type of demonstration image alongside press photographs by Willy Römer and Bernard Larsson, contrasting their approaches with Wesely’s several-minute exposures, in which moving people become traces or translucent figures^*5 Where press photography makes faces, placards, and decisive gestures legible, Wesely’s image records the duration of occupation—the fact that a crowd continued to pass through the site for five minutes. In his work on the renovation of the Neue Nationalgalerie, he likewise incorporated the stages between closure and reopening into the photographic process, recording the progress of construction over time^*22 SITE ZONES documents another project on the Neue Nationalgalerie renovation in which four cameras repeatedly made two-minute exposures, layering moving objects as translucent traces^*24 Here too, Wesely does not treat longer exposure as inherently better; he adjusts the unit of exposure to follow the progress of the work.

Open Shutter — Nearly Three Years at MoMA in a Single Image

Open Shutter records roughly three years in which MoMA’s building was dismantled, expanded, and rebuilt. MoMA’s artist page lists several long-exposure works from 2001–04, showing that Wesely photographed the same renovation from multiple fixed positions^*4 His official exhibition history shows continued collaborations with museums and architectural institutions after this project, indicating that long exposure became part of both architectural photography and institutional commissions^*12 A commemorative photograph made after completion preserves only one state of the building. Here, pre-demolition walls, structural frames under construction, and new architecture coexist at different densities. The unit of record is the entire renovation from 2001 to 2004. Galerie Fahnemann’s exhibition history separately lists MoMA’s Open Shutter in 2004, Open Shutter in Berlin in 2006, and Potsdamer Platz in 2011, showing that the method extended beyond a single commission into multiple architectural and urban projects^*20.

1:100 Past and Present — From Architectural Scale to Temporal Scale

In 1:100 Past and Present, devoted to the Barcelona Pavilion, Wesely revisits the 1929 building, its dismantling, its reconstruction in the 1980s, and its subsequent use through both photography and architectural history. Wesely’s official announcement identifies the project as a collaboration with the Fundació Mies van der Rohe^*13 The foundation presents “1:100” as a device that overlays the scale of an architectural drawing with a scale of time, relating the pavilion’s present to historical material^*14 Exhibition materials describe a structure in which long-exposure photographs of the reconstructed pavilion are compared with records from its past^*15.

Arquivo Brasília — Selecting 1,400 Images from 10,000 Construction Photographs

In the collaborative project Arquivo Brasília with Lina Kim, Wesely’s investigation of time shifts from long exposure to the study of existing photographs. Kehrer’s Archiv Utopia juxtaposes historical images from Brasília’s construction with new work by the two artists, reconsidering how the planned capital has been pictured^*16 According to Wallpaper*, the artists examined roughly 10,000 construction photographs in public archives and selected about 1,400, including materials affected by deterioration and discoloration^*17 The Brazilian newspaper Folha likewise describes the archival search itself as central to the project, extending beyond photographs of Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa’s architecture to records of construction sites and everyday life^*18 Here, prolonged research through a large body of existing photographs replaces prolonged exposure, recovering stages of construction omitted from the official image of the completed capital.

Selecting an Instant, or Allowing Time to Accumulate

Wesely’s long exposures cannot be fully understood simply as the opposite of photographic traditions centered on selecting an instant. The Instituto Moreira Salles exhibition Câmera Aberta brought together urban and architectural photographs exposed over years with still lifes, showing the same principle operating across very different temporal scales^*7 Across the institution’s collection, the duration of exposure varies according to the subject^*8 Related video material presents the camera apparatus and working process, showing that exposure time is a condition established when the shutter is opened^*9 Whether a person, vehicle, temporary structure, or building remains visible depends on how long it occupied the same position relative to the total exposure. This principle of selection is the most concrete difference from ordinary short exposures. In 2005, the exhibition catalog Die Erfindung des Unsichtbaren was published by Fotohof and Fahnemann Projekte in conjunction with exhibitions at Guardini Galerie in Berlin and Fotohof in Salzburg^*19.

Doubleday — Returning the Camera to the Site of an Earlier Photograph

In the recent Doubleday project, Wesely identifies the viewpoints of historical photographs, returns to the same sites in Berlin, and photographs in the same direction before precisely superimposing the two images. The Museum für Fotografie presents examples in which nineteenth-century pedestrians at Alexanderplatz overlap with present-day tourists, postwar ruins with reconstructed buildings, and the vanished Monbijou Palace with the park that occupies its former site^*5This differs from Open Shutter, where a single camera remained open for years, but the underlying operation is comparable: different moments at the same place are made visible in one frame. Long exposure layers time within a single negative; Doubleday reconstructs the viewpoint of an older photograph in the present and overlays two moments of exposure. Reducing Wesely’s work to a long-exposure technique would miss this broader investigation of time through reconstructed viewpoints and reused historical images.