Michael Wesely

Potsdamer Platz 27.3.1997-13.12.1998, 2000

The extremely long exposure times of Michael Wesely’s analogue photographs allow us to visually experience time and transformation. Between 1997 and 2000, he documented construction work at the Potsdamer Platz. Exposure time: up to 26 months. This method allows the photographer to create temporal documentations of the process of urban development: countless individual moments bonded to form an atmospheric overall picture of this gigantic construction site, with buildings that appear almost transparent owing to their being constructed from overlapping spatiotemporal layers, with the lines of movement, of light and of the weather, captured over the changing seasons, running through them. As the subject of his photography, Wesely has chosen a historically significant location that is highly symbolic. It was condemned for many years to the role of peripheral industrial wasteland owing to its being cut in two by the Berlin Wall, but following the fall of the Wall, it became a symbol for German reunification, and for the beginning of a new era following the ending of the Cold War.