Michael Wesely - Still Lifes

I've mentioned Michael Wesely before. I really quite liked his layered time-lapse photographs of all the reconstruction in Berlin - quite brilliant. But it didnt quite seem to translate when he was commissioned (?) to photograph the new construction at MoMA in New York (although one colour version I saw seemed to hit the spot).

Then he did some very minimalist almost colour field landscapes of the US and Germany. I'm not sure if they were time-lapse or blurred or what, but they felt like they were in danger of pushing the originality into novelty (although now I've looked at this one below over the last few days - even as a small jpeg- I find I've actually come to quite like it...).

Now I see he has more time lapse work - this time cut flowers - Stillleben (Still-Lifes). I don't know, flowers (especially cut flowers) have been done so many times before, by artists and photographers through the generations. But it still seems to a subject that can be done well time and time again (think Friedlander's wonderful and yet expedient Stems). In this case, I think Wesely flowers moving from fresh to decay is a worthwhile addition. They are also quite beautiful.

"This series of flower portraits, as yet incomplete, is a further stage in Wesely's persistent investigation into photographic reproduction as a temporal phenomenon. In these images he captures the blossoming and fading of flowers using exposures of five to ten days. The resulting images become memory stores with great aesthetic appeal due to their egalitarian reproduction of all phenomena. In these shots, time appears less a vectorial phenomenon than the result of spatial relations. Indeed, a time lag is inscribed into the images by the rhythm and perspective layering of the delicate, spectrally transparent petals and the stems in their whirring dance; they not only give the pictorial space more depth, but also extend the visual time necessary for every perception quite tangibly. In this way, Wesely succeeds in breaching the primacy that applies in his medium - that of the right moment - in favour of the history picture, which is, however, subject to an entirely new interpretation here."...