Wesely, Michael. Open Shutter: The Museum of Modern Art by Michael Wesely.

MoMA, 2004. Hardcover, illustrated boards with black cloth spine, not issued with dust jacket. [Photos are of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, taken from several different angles during the renovation of 2001-2004. German photographer Wesely's unusual technique is to use a small hole to expose negatives for an unusually long time, sometimes for years.] Like new. 

Michael Wesely (born 1963) is a German art photographer renowned for his pioneering work with custom pinhole cameras and ultra-long exposures that capture the passage of time over extended periods. Born in Munich, he studied at the Bavarian State School of Photography and the Academy of Fine Arts Munich before moving his studio to Berlin.Wesely is celebrated for developing specialized techniques that leave a camera shutter open for days, months, or even years, allowing him to document urban transformations, architectural developments, and still life decay in a single image.Notable projects include documenting the redevelopment of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall and his Open Shutter project commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York to record its extensive renovation.His ghostly, layered compositions overlay fleeting human activity with permanent structures, offering a meditation on time, transience, and urban evolution that has earned international museum exhibitions and public acclaim.

Open Shutter: The Museum of Modern Art (2004) is a unique photographic monograph by German artist Michael Wesely. The book documents the multi-year transformation of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) during its major renovation and expansion by architect Yoshio Taniguchi between 2001 and 2004.

The Technique: Ultra-Long Exposure

The defining characteristic of the book is Wesely’s use of extreme long-exposure photography. Using custom-built pinhole cameras, Wesely kept the shutters open for months—and in some cases, years—at a time.

• Capturing Time: Unlike traditional photography that freezes a fraction of a second, these images collapse years of activity into a single frame.

• The "Ghost" Effect: Because only static objects remain clear, the cranes, workers, and changing weather appear as ethereal streaks of light and "ghost" structures.

Key Visual Themes

• Layers of History: The photographs show the old museum building being stripped away while the new structure slowly rises in its place, with both versions of the building superimposed upon each other.

• The Passage of Light: The sun’s path across the sky over several years creates vibrant, rhythmic arcs of light that cut across the urban landscape.

• Architectural Evolution: The book serves as a "metabolic" record of architecture, depicting the building as a living, breathing entity that evolves rather than a static object.

Content and Production

• Essays: The book features introductory texts by MoMA curators (such as Sarah Hermanson Meister) that provide context on both the architectural project and Wesely’s place in contemporary photography.

• Format: Published by Steidl in conjunction with MoMA, the book is noted for its high production quality, necessary to capture the complex tonal ranges and dense detail of Wesely’s large-format plates.

Significance

Open Shutter is considered a masterpiece of time-based photography. It challenges the fundamental definition of the medium as a "decisive moment," instead presenting photography as a way to visualize the invisible flow of time and the monumental labor involved in reshaping a world-class cultural institution.