"NYC Short Stories"

NBA final, Sporting Club, New York
B0468

C-print on aluminum on acrylic glass (Diasec)

signed, dated, titled and numbered (ink) on verso

With extreme long exposures, which can last from minutes to hours to years, Michael Wesely depicts motifs and situations in the course of their change, in the flow of their movement in photography. The result is a photographic image that captures everything that has happened in front of the self-constructed, permanently mounted camera in the time it takes to open the shutter. The human eye is unable to perceive the process. With this technique, Wesely condenses the processual nature of time. Through the transfer to the cinematic, or rather due to the numerous overlapping and thus seemingly simultaneous images of change created by the long exposure, photography as a medium of the snapshot and time as a chronological quantity are put up for discussion anew. Wesely's hyperreal photographs are based on everyday places, things and situations: Images are created of biological processes such as the withering of a flower, of urban developments such as new buildings or construction sites, of changes in nature or even of human actions. In depictions of places where time per se already plays a major role - such as train stations - or where the change of the annual cycle becomes visible (sunrises and sunsets), the examination of time is intensified. Through the characteristic of the long exposure, the blur, triggered above all by the movement of people, which can lead to their “dissolution” in the case of violent actions, time is also made visible in its quality of disappearance.
(Petra Noll, 2013, translated with DeepL.com)