Michael Wesely Open Shutter: The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Meister, Sarah Hermanson

ISBN 10: 0870706829 / ISBN 13: 9780870706820

Published by Museum of Modern Art, 2004

About this Item

Museum of Modern Art 2004. Like New hardcover. Interior clean, no writings.

Seller Inventory # 017664

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Michael Wesely Open Shutter: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Publisher: Museum of Modern Art
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0870706829
• ISBN 13: 9780870706820
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: As New
• Book Type: Book
• Seller catalogs:
  • Non-fiction
  • Arts, Music, Photography

About this title

Synopsis

Since the early 1990s, German photographer Michael Wesely has been inventing and refining techniques for using extremely long camera exposures to take uniquely compelling photographs. Through the use of filters and a very small aperture, yet one that is standard in a professional camera lens, he is able to diminish the amount of light hitting the negative to the point where he can extend the exposure many thousands of times longer than we would ordinarily expect. Some of Wesely's pictures of the rebuilding of Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, for example, in a series completed in 1999, were continuously exposed over a period of 26 months. The results of Wesely's explorations are as surprising as they are beautiful. In 2001, as The Museum of Modern Art began to prepare for its ambitious construction and renovation project, a turning point in its history, it recognized in Wesely's work an unequalled opportunity to artistically document that project. In August of that year, then, Wesely set specially designed cameras in long-term installations in and around the museum, choosing his locations for the construction views they provided. Nearly three years later, the images are complete, and their pentimento-like strata of transparencies and overlays render the construction project's evolution in time as a dense and delicate network of forms and colors in space. Open Shutter accompanies an exhibition organized by Sarah Hermanson Meister, Associate Curator of the museum's Department of Photography. Included in the book are several images of the construction of the new Museum of Modern Art.