Ansen Seale & Michael Wesely

Heike also mentioned in our tutorial two photographers I should look at for my 360 degree picture work.

I have looked at both and they seem quite interesting.

 

Ansen Seale

Reality Takes A U-Turn

Cloudscape

Roadcut

Sourced from:

http://ansenseale.com/gallery.cfm?id=19

 

Ansen seale has a very original and unique way of photographing the world. He says that the camera ‘scans’ the landscape and has to be moved to work, usually by car, but also plane or train.It takes thousands of vertical slices in rapid succession.

The work is not like anything I have ever seen before. Not using a camera anyway. It is very much like a scanner in the way it looks. When you move something on a scanner you can sometimes get this effect but it is not usually desired. The idea of ‘scanning’ the landscape really intrigues me. And how it takes the world in horizontal slices is also very interesting. Our mind rarely works vertically and especially not when looking at landscape, it is almost exclusively seen horizontally.

My favourite picture out of these three is ‘Reality takes a U-turn’. The picture created by the camera is so interesting, yes it looks similar to a picture taken with a wide angle lens but you have to take into account how it was taken. The car was obviously turned around whilst the picture was being taken and the effect it has on the road going off into the distance and the vanishing point is amazing. The clouds and road just look like they are being dragged into a worm hole.

I love this work and it has definitely inspired me to try something myself. But I want to keep the strong horizontal lines in my work and not create to much chaos in the picture.

 

Michael Wesely

9.8.2001 – 2.5.2003 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

4.4.1997 – 4.6.1999 Potsdamer Platz, Berlin

5.4.1997 – 3.6.1999 Potsdamer Platz, Berlin

Sourced from:

http://photoslaves.com/open-shutter-by-michael-wesely/

 

Michael Weselys pictures are said to be the longest photographic exposures in the world. His work on MoMA in New York was exposed for 3 years whilst the buildings were torn down and rebuilt from 2001 to 2004. The pictures created are amazing in detail but also a mass of confusion as well. You can see the skeleton of what was and the finished product of what is there now all together in a single frame. In a way death and rebirth is intertwined and long periods of time are shown together as one moment.

His work is extremely inspiring in the fact that he has been waiting years for a single shot. But also the amount of time and effort he has put into practising and learning how long his exposures will need to be. To test a 3 year exposure you first have to try it for 6 months and work out how to not over expose a 3 year shot. Never has the term putting all your eggs in one basket been more photographically true.

This work is very interesting but doesn’t help my photographic practise for this module a great deal. It does remind me of my work at the start with the 4 point spin shots. the ghostly skeletons of structures layered on top of each other.I will keep this work in mind but I dont think I will use to much of it in my own work for this module.