Michael Wesely’s Images of Time

Today we are in a very special place in the middle of Berlin - right next to the Brandenburg Gate. Here, in the Max Liebermann Haus, Michael Wesely currently has a large exhibition with hundreds of pictures and even his own photo studio! But more about that later, because the many photos tell exciting stories. For example, there is a whole room with photographs of the immediate surroundings of the exhibition house. They look decades into the past and show that the building was destroyed in World War II, how the rubble was cleared away, trees and vegetable beds grew, the Berlin Wall was built and torn down again, and the building was finally rebuilt roughly as it once looked.

Of course, Michael didn’t take all the photos himself; for the very early ones, he wasn’t even born yet! They come from an archive – that is a large collection of pictures or objects on a certain topic. Michael looked carefully at the photos in the archive and selected some that showed a similar detail. He then hung his selection in a very long row and superimposed various enlarged sections of it over each picture. What Michael finds particularly exciting is not only what a photographer consciously wants to capture, but also all the other incidental and random things that happen in the background. Often these secret stories tell much more about a certain time or place than the actual motif: it can be the lunch break of a construction worker, the argument of a couple or the dripping ice cream of a child. It is the small everyday moments that Michael gives a stage – or better: a place on the wall – in his work.

But Michael is actually famous for a very special kind of photography that captures a certain period of time not on many different images, but on a single one. Namely, he invented a technique for leaving the lens of a camera open for a super long time. During this time – in photography it’s called exposure time – every change and movement is burned onto a piece of negative film (that’s the rolled-up brown strip that’s in analog cameras). For his exhibition, Michael installed cameras at the house to capture the goings-on around the Brandenburg Gate. Unfortunately, we can’t see the results yet, but in the exhibition hangs for it a picture of a bouquet of flowers, on which the individual flowers are visible from the blossom to the complete withering. Or a picture of a cemetery that Michael took over a whole year. He explains to us that the duration can be seen through the many streaks of light in the sky – representing the different positions of the sun as it changes throughout the year. So we can even see the different movements of the globe in a single photo!

That’s pretty impressive, and it makes our heads spin a bit. He smiles proudly and admits that he has been taking photos for a long time – he borrowed his mother’s camera when he was 14 and bought his first camera when he was 15. He has often taken many photos of a situation, because each one can only depict a single moment. These moments can tell very different stories, but they always show only a fraction of the whole. That’s why it was often difficult for him to decide on one. That’s when he began to try out how he could capture as many moments as possible in a single image, in order to perhaps get a little closer to the truth. Michael would like to try this out with us, too: We stand in front of a gray screen and stay there for five minutes. Some try to stay very still so that they can be seen as clearly as possible in the picture. Others make extra wild or controlled movements to see what happens. The final click of the camera is also a bit of a release – that may have been the longest five minutes of our lives! Michael promises us that we will get the picture in a few days and then we can take it home. We are already very excited to see what “truths” Michael’s photo has to tell about us!