I first met the artist Henry Wessel in 1976, while I was one of his undergraduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute. I began to collect his work when I was his student, and in the decades since, I have acquired many more of his photographs.
Wessel (1942–2018) first came to prominence in 1972, with a solo exhibition at MoMA in New York. In 1975, his work was included in the seminal group show New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.
Wessel’s commitment to making what he called “still photographs that function as visual Haikus” was consistent throughout his career. His practice in organizing and displaying his work evolved over time. He kept moving to new projects and thus resisted being slotted into a school or category. This exhibition traces and illuminates Wessel’s mastery of still photography as fine art and the evolution of his practice.
Initially, his work centered on exhibitions, both institutional and commercial in nature, sometimes with related catalogs. Newer photographs would often be interspersed with important images culled from earlier efforts. Wessel later moved emphatically to making sequences of photographs explicitly intended as one work. These were issued as portfolios and published as books with minimal information beyond the photographs themselves—not even place names and dates—eschewing context in favor of the “thing” itself.
The exhibition includes examples of photographs from his full oeuvre and the books in which they appear. Two complete portfolios, Incidents and Traffic, which werealso published as books or parts of books, will rotate in the gallery: Incidents is on view in full through October 12, replaced by Traffic for the final weeks of the exhibition.
Wessel regarded these two late efforts as among his most important. He believed they were successful expressions of the three equally important legs of compelling photographic art: Saying “Yes!” to the moment when intuition suggests an opportunity; culling the results to learn from both success and failure; and organizing successful photographs into bodies of work where the wisdom inherent in individual images is emphasized and enlarged by the companion images and their sequencing.
Jack Gray, Curator
Acknowledgements
Exhibitions | Shira Buchsbaum, Oscar Salguero Publications | Ann Donahue, Misha Beletsky Programs | April Rose Art Preparation | Deanna Lee, Scott Whipkey Graphic Design | Michael Russem Printing | MetPhoto Chair, Members Exhibitions | Beppy Owen Chair, Publications | Arnold Hirshon
