Today I’m looking at something completely inevitable - the passing of time.
In a way this has always been a subject in art - many a grandiose tomb or portrait painting attempts to stop time.
And yet.
And yet…we do, now have power over the passing of time.
Or at least, we can make it visible in an instant. Which makes for a lovely paradox.
A photograph can use long exposure to capture time passing and make it visible in a split second. Magical.
German photographer Michael Wesely has specialised in long exposure photography, and created an amazing body of work.
Take his self portrait for example, which I’m looking at right now. I see a blurred image of a man moving his head slightly from left to right, resulting in two pairs of eyes and glasses.
If you’re used to taking snapshots this one would go straight into the bin. But this isn’t supposed to be a sharp portrait of someone’s face. It’s a portrait of five minutes of someone’s life, which is something completely different. And in a way, it can tell us maybe even more about the sitter than a standard portrait would.
From these it’s a logical step to his flower still lifes, for which he photographed flower bouquets for exposures around a week. It’s quite amazing to see them blooming, wilting, dying, all in one, still image.
These are the most explicit memento mori ’s I’ve ever seen - much more effective than the picture of a skull or rotted fruit you’ll generally see in vanitas paintings.
And for those of you who think this might be quite an easy thing to accomplish: think again. It’s easy enough to achieve in multiple exposures, but not in one single one.
If you use a normal camera this will never work, your photograph will be quite overexposed before any flower has wilted.
I can still imagine making something like the wilting flowers in a very dark room, using lots of neutral density films on my camera, but Wesely most famous projects are impossible to imitate.
He took multiple year (yes, YEAR) exposures of construction sites, like Potsdamer Platz in Berlin or the renovation of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
This is incredible work. When you look at one of these pictures, you’re actually looking at a collection of moments of several years in one image. Mind-boggling.
In Wesely’s own words:
“It’s a shock to see a picture that’s collected so much time - so many things happen and the entire picture is a huge accumulation of time and it’s hard to digest.”
“Time is creating AND erasing at the same time on the picture“
Wesely builds his own large camera’s to accomplish these multi-year projects and hasn’t yet disclosed how he manages to create these stunning cityscapes.
I find them mesmerising and magical, both on a visual and a conceptual level.
And what about this image of tourists on a bridge in Venice. Here he is not only playing with time, but also with the act of looking. We are looking at people looking at Venice for a couple of minutes. In capturing the passing of time, he is slowing us down to look - and to think about the act of looking.
We don’t need to argue about the question whether a photograph is a ’true’ depiction of reality, it never can be. But if there is such a thing as truth in photography, then maybe Wesely’s multiple year exposures come very close to it.
What I’m taking away from this is an increased awareness of the complicated relation between photography and time. Of our ability to capture change. And I’m definitely tempted to start playing with longer exposures and see where that leads me.
I hope you’ll do the same, and I’ll be back tomorrow, with another episode on Time.