"New Delhi Railway Station, Indien (17.29 - 17.34 Uhr, 29.12.2005)"

B4866

UltraSec (C-print on glass on aluminum), metal frame

The image is part of a series of photographs taken by German photographer Michael Wesely at the New Delhi train station in India, serving as a visual metaphor for the fleeting nature of urban time, in which moving people appear as traces while the architecture remains a constant structure, The 5-minute exposure is a very short exposure time compared to Wesely’s other works, but even five minutes is a period of time in which very little is clearly identifiable in photographs of people. Wesely is interested in seeing “what his camera has seen”¹ – that is, not the individual moment, but the visible traces of movement over time.
New Delhi Railway Station is one of the busiest train stations in the world – over 500,000 passengers board and disembark here daily.
(Christoph Fuchs)

Notes

1
Jürgen Harten, "How Wesely’s Images Have Time," in: Michael Wesely, Time Works, Munich 2010, https://wesely.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Harten_TimeWorks_DEU.pdf (accessed 26.1.2026)