It is common belief that a good photographer has to take sharp pictures. Michael Wesely, however, demonstrates just the opposite. Among the many variables, which the photographic process allows to manipulate, he is obsessed with only one: the exposure time of the shutter, practiced to the extreme. Some photographers work with exposure times of several seconds, but days, weeks, months, even years? They are Michael Wesely s domain and he tries them with all photographic subjects: portraiture, landscapes, still lives, plants, and buildings. Thus it seems only natural that sunrises and sunsets, becoming and fading play a dominant role in his work. Life itself leaves traces and wipes them out. This is Michael Wesely s major theme, documented for the first time in this book by a representative selectionof pictures. German art historian Jurgen Harten comments on Wesely s work, a solitaire within the contemporary world of photography, in an illuminating essay.