Camaera constructs
Last year when i was doing my time lapse photography i was chatting to a guy in a pub in Hackney, about photography and he suggested i look at this quy Michael Wesely. Given the fact this is the type of pub where you are likely to get knee capped for ordering a shandy this pearl of wisdom was quite surprising. With the camera constructs workshop coming up i thought i'd post a couple of links to some websites to do with photography. Michael Wesely was born in Germany and if Roman Vishniac is the grandfather of time lapse photography then Michael Wesely has to be it's grandson, taking it to some new extremes. This is an extract from Wired:
Michael Wesely's photographs don't capture the moment - they capture years. To document the renovation of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, Wesely placed eight custom-made, weather-proofed cameras at the construction site for 34 months. This particular picture - from the extended exposure of a 5 x 7-inch glass plate negative - looks southeast along West 54th Street. The sun's movement left wide stripes in the sky, while the workers and the cranes are nowhere to be seen, too transient to have been recorded. What we do see are what Wesely calls the "leftovers of the construction process," anything that was visible for about 100 days.
Wesely, 40, who says his father "baptized him with photo chemicals," first experimented with long-exposure photography as a way to reveal subjects more truly than he could in the click of a shutter. As his exposures crept from seconds to minutes, hours to days, months to years, he shifted from people to massive construction projects. Makes you wish he'd been around when they built the pyramids.
- Jessie Scanlon