Michael Wesely (10.37 – 10.42 Uhr, 13.3.2012) Credit: Michael Wesely
In your photographs you attempt to make time visible. What is time for you?
Photography is always based on time, always capturing a moment in time. Initially, therefore, it makes no difference whether I have chosen short or an extremely long exposure times. For they always lead to images, and in my artwork with photography that is precisely what concerns me: images.
Time is more like the vehicle I use to arrive at images and photos that are different from those we encounter en masse in everyday life. Ostensibly, I don’t do anything different to a documentary photographer, for example. But the extreme length of exposure leads to a shift in perception. It’s no longer the motif alone that counts ‒ that is often a more invisible than visible, merely looming presence. But peripheral conditions such as light, movement, and other atmospheric elements emerge differently as focal points.
The extended, often extremely long exposure time is a tool with which to add certain visual deficits to the images. In this way, new freedoms of perception and possibilities for viewing evolve, and the otherwise so immediate type of photographic reproduction is turned around in parts: what emerges is a kind of invisibility. On the basis of the title, which is an important component of my work, you know what has been registered, but the motif may be defined only in a very fragmentary fashion, and as the viewer you are able to complete the image for yourself.
Gilles Deleuze once maintained in an analysis of suggested movements in stone sculptures that “The image can only take on meaning and become complete in the mind of the viewer”. The same thing can be said of my photographic scenarios: they need to be completed. One could, if one wished, refer in this sense to emancipation. I set my free, open images alongside the finished photographic products of our everyday life today.
So are your pictures a way of reflecting on our perception?
Yes. In the age of the video live-stream we have arrived at a point that is (almost) impossible to surpass in terms of plurality (in a positive sense) but also with a view to arbitrariness: minute after minute, positions and opinions in all fields of life are being overlaid or questioned by new perspectives from those who think differently; we can talk, not only about the gigantic flood of media but also one of perspectives.
My images reflect on that, as well: the representative function of photography has been wiped out – what remains are the overlapping moments on my film, which repeatedly write over everything that happened and was inscribed there before.
And so reducing my images to a visualisation of time passing is too summary an initial reflex. The work of contemplation is only just starting after this rapid recognition of our transient nature.
The works exhibited in Another Pencil of Nature – Part 2 are reinterpretations of old works. To what extent do the photos develop a new message through this revision process?
For some time now I have been intensively reworking my older pieces. In particular while retouching, I noticed how sections suddenly became visible, making a stronger impression as an image than the shot as a whole. For example, if you look at the image on the invitation card, you notice that there is nothing in this section to provide any sort of anchorage for the eye. Much has been gained by that already, because the usual expectation regarding a photograph is disappointed: for people assume it will have a recognisable motif. But the resulting irritation opens up spaces for entirely different ideas and possibilities. So, at that point I develop twice as much interest in the image, knowing full well that a simple branch in the wind, photographed in a slightly different way, can trigger associations that were not necessarily to be expected. The image opens up because the dictatorship of the perspective has been lost. This takes us into an open sphere of associations.
You are well-known for your long-term exposures of social events. Most recently, however, you have been concerning yourself increasingly with more traditional motifs like the still-life. Do you see yourself among the nature photographers, in the tradition of photography’s inventors?
The title of the exhibition Another Pencil of Nature already indicates its subject: it refers to the first photo book in the world, which William Fox Talbot published under the title The Pencil of Nature between 1844 and 1846. At the time he showed the world everything that photography could do, presenting what this »pencil« – that is, light – is capable of doing on a large number of picture panels. Photography was confronted by innumerable problems in those days. Above all, this applied to exposure times, which were far too long to allow sharp depictions of everything that people wished to see on a photo. It was out of the question, to people at that time, for a person only half visible, blurred, to signify something essential or even reveal a poetic quality. The world expected something different from photography: it was to provide a fresh, direct conveyance of reality, which led, as a side effect, to the fact that painting was liberated from documentary responsibility. It became autonomous, while photography was attributed the fuction of documenting reality – or what we consider as such – in sharply reproduced images.
My work makes use of these apparent weaknesses of the photographic medium, exploiting them to their full extent. Perhaps the circle is closing here: what Talbot excluded from his book for technical reasons in those days represents the foundation of my work today. However, it lies in a completely new context, in which our perception has changed fundamentally through a consumption of images that has increased to literally gigantic proportions.
What camera do you use? Digital or analogue? And why?
Long exposure times were a domain of analogue photography. For a few years now, I have also been employing digital cameras in my work, because I believe that it is important to move with the times, as far as possible. Analogue technology has its well-known limits and now it is time to discover and define new limits in digital photography. Seen from that point of view, this is a very exciting aspect of contemporary photography.
Do you build your own apparatuses when required?
For many years I have been constructing my own cameras. These are always with large-format lenses, which have extremely sharp imaging power, and I have constructed cameras around those lenses. In this context, people have tended to credit me with the use of pin-hole cameras, which I would like to put right here. My shots of Potsdamer Platz and the Museum of Modern Art in New York were all recorded using the best possible, sharp lenses, and with cameras I had constructed for them.
Back to the exhibition in the Alfred Erhardt Stiftung: in the press text there is reference to sections, so how did you select those? Did you edit works digitally and enlarge them?
All my images can be found in my archive in digital form, and they are printed on photo paper from an initial file. The word “exposed” is simply a relic from past times, when images were still brought onto paper via enlarging apparatus.
The exhibition is called “Part2” ‒ what is the connection to Part1? Indeed, is there one?
In autumn 2013 my exhibition “Another pencil of nature” was shown in the Nord/LB art gallery in Hanover, with portraits that had also been created using extended exposure times. Since 1988 I have been capturing the people in front of my camera with an exposure time of 5 minutes, which leads to the development of mostly imperfect, sometimes blurred images. A publication about this work was issued by Distanz Verlag.
What is the relationship between your works and those of Talbot?
The title of the exhibition Another Pencil of Nature already indicates its subject: it refers to the first photo book in the world, which William Fox Talbot published under the title The Pencil of Nature between 1844 and 1846. At the time he showed the world everything that photography could do, presenting what this »pencil« – that is, light – is capable of doing on a large number of picture panels. Photography was confronted by innumerable problems in those days. Above all, this applied to exposure times, which were far too long to allow sharp depictions of everything that people wished to see on a photo. It was out of the question, to people at that time, for a person only half visible, blurred, to signify something essential or even reveal a poetic quality. The world expected something different from photography: it was to provide a fresh, direct conveyance of reality, which led, as a side effect, to the fact that painting was liberated from documentary responsibility. It became autonomous, while photography was attributed the fuction of documenting reality – or what we consider as such – in sharply reproduced images.
My work makes use of these apparent weaknesses of the photographic medium, exploiting them to their full extent. Perhaps the circle is closing here: what Talbot excluded from his book for technical reasons in those days represents the foundation of my work today. However, it lies in a completely new context, in which our perception has changed fundamentally through a consumption of images that has increased to literally gigantic proportions.
MICHAEL WESELY. ANOTHER PENCIL OF NATURE – PART 2
September 20 to December 21, 2014
Accompanying programm: Wednesday, October 22, 2014, 7 pm: Artist talk: Michael Wesely and Prof. Dr. Hubertus von Amelunxen, President European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, on William Henry Fox Talbot
ALFRED EHRHARD FOUNDATION
Auguststr. 75 | 10117 Berlin
Opening Hours: Tue to Sun 11 – 18 h, Thu 11 – 21 h
MICHAEL WESELY. THE EPIC VIEW
September 21, 2014 to January 11, 2015
Mies van der Rohe Haus| Oberseestraße 60 | 13053 Berlin