Vis-à-vis BLDGBLOG's post yesterday on slow photography (and what sounds like a proposal for a neo-atavist Google Street View for off-the-beaten-path, off-grid landscapes, with herds of Strandbeesten replacing Google's fleet of peeping toms), here are Michael Wesely's two-year-long exposure photographs documenting the post-reunification construction on Berlin's Postdamer Platz.
Commissioned by DaimlerChrysler, the images were taken from five different locations between 1997 and 1999. We see “the chronological sequences of the construction activity into one simultaneous action, whereby an infinite number of individual moments overlap until they form a complex structure of fragments of reality. Before and after fuse together.”
Beautifully captured as well is the sun streaking across the sky, its brushstroke-like retinal burn adding to the painterly quality of the photographs. “The massive constructions seem almost transparent,” writes Weseley, “yet the rays of sun in the sky documenting the various seasonal positions of the sun, gain a surprising level of materiality.”
Also worth looking into are Michael Wesely's three-year long exposure photographs of the construction of the Museum of Modern Art.