In this episode of On Lightness, I have the pleasure of speaking with the visionary photographer Michael Wesely. We talk about his breathtaking year-long exposure photographs, how he became the godfather of this unique art form, and how his work reshapes our perception of time, space, and the built environment around us. It was a refreshing change to explore lightness through the lens of a photographer, expanding the field of this podcast into new territory.

This episode was moderated and produced by Leon Hidalgo.

The following article is meant as an informational extension of the podcast episode:

Michael graduated from his photography studies in Munich with a curiosity for the state of his discipline. Early on, he began to question the often aggressive act of image-making — the idea that a photographer takes or even grabs a picture. He rejected this notion and from this resistance, a new method slowly crystallized — one that would define his artistic journey: the technique of Ultra-long Exposure Photography.

Beginning with his five-minute portraits, Michael found a way to let the subjects create their own images.

Lightness¹ the quality of having little weight

Michael thinks lightweight structures barely exist in the contemporary architecture of Germany today. With his connection to South America he learned to appreciate the lighter and simplistic way of building – especially in Brasil, where he often traveled to.

A Camera, he says, is a room, even in our phones there is this small dark room. In his early explorations he played with the composition of this space, which ultimately led him to his famous technique.

He associates weight not just with physical mass but with effort and time. A long exposure, spanning five years, may result in an image of the same size as one taken in a millisecond, yet its weight is greater. It carries the gravity of duration.

Today, technology allows Michael to travel much lighter, which he welcomes with a certain relief. It took him 10 years to implement his whole process from analogue into the digital photography realm.

lightness² the state of being light in color or shade

Light, to Michael, is everything. Photography, he reminds us, is born of light, time, and space. If one pays close attention, the performance of natural light throughout the day can be more exciting than any cinema, and it’s free. Light reveals thing, a certain sunlight glancing off a brick wall can reveal the quality of craftsmanship.

If Michael’s photography were an architecture, it would be one that catches and tracks the sunlight throughout the day, a building that collaborates with the rhythms of the sun. Something closer to indigenous architecture, built with precise knowledge of the local natural conditions.

lightness³ being carefree or feeling without burden

For Michael, time is always relative. Its scale depends on perception, on how each of us forming our own reality of the world. What interests him most is the space between the visible and the invisible, the ambiguity in which imagination begins. That tension has always been central to his work.

He’s fascinated by how time changes spaces, by the physical traces of the past that often go unnoticed. Remembering them, he says, helps us see how lucky we are to sharing the present moment.

In one recent project, Michael played with the architectural scale of 1:100, but instead of using it to describe space, he imagined it as a measure of time. Thinking about how a place or a design might appear in a hundred years, he believes, is a valuable exercise not only for photographers but also for architects.

This way of thinking, projecting time forward and backward, also defined a turning point in his own life. When Michael decided to create his first one-year exposure, he couldn’t know what would come of it. Looking back, that experiment became a foundation for everything that followed.

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