Henry Wessel Knihy

In the fall of 1960 Henry Wessel (1942–2018) left his family home in New Jersey to attend college in Central Pennsylvania. At the time, Wessel had never been further west than Philadelphia. On Friday afternoons, to offset the daily classroom cadence, Wessel would pack a knapsack and hitchhike west. Once Saturday afternoon had ended, he would cross the highway and hitchhike back east, hoping to arrive in time for class on Monday morning. Though Wessel would not begin to photograph until years later, these early forays west planted seeds of discovery that proved fruitful for decades to come.Hitchhike is a westward journey from the grassy farmlands in the Midwest to the wide, open, dusty landscape further west. This precisely arranged sequence of photos draws from Wessel’s 50-year archive. The images describe barns, gas stations, traveling salesmen, dogs asleep in truck beds, families eating in diners and open highways, all lit by bright western light, almost physical in its presence.

This book presents three independent bodies of work by Henry Wessel, each being a precise sequence arranged to give the viewer the experience of what it felt like to pass through the territory described. The first series “Traffic” shows Wessel’s photos of drivers stuck in traffic as he commuted in the early 1980s from Richmond, California, to San Francisco in the morning rush hour. Wessel records the determination, impatience and blank boredom of his fellow drivers as they navigate a daily drill that seems at times daunting and hopeless. “Sunset Park” is Wessel’s series of night photos of the modest working-class neighborhood of Sunset Park in Santa Monica. Over four years in the mid-1990s, Wessel captured the nocturnal transformation of suburbia into a strange, sometimes eerie, landscape. In his words: “You can’t help but notice how the world is reconfigured by the lights at night. The spot lighting of particular areas, the lack of ambient light, the unnatural way that shadows are cast, all take us to an unfamiliar place…” Wessel’s final series “Continental Divide” takes the viewer on a ride from the dense, suburban flatlands of the Midwest, up across the Rocky Mountains, and down into the sparse desert landscape of the American West. Wessel depicts its houses, shacks, street corners, and the highway, reminding us of the inherent aesthetics of the everyday.

This book presents three independent bodies of work by Henry Wessel from the past five decades. Each is a precise sequence recreating the experience of passing through the territory described. “Walkabout” invites the viewer to walk with Wessel through workingclass neighborhoods and bordering urban areas. The photos show sun-soaked homes, cars, bars, alleyways, gas stations and cyclone fences, reminding us that intuition can lead to dramatic possibilities anywhere. Wessel describes his approach: “At the core of this receptivity is a process that might be called soft eyes. It is a physical sensation. You are not looking for something. You are open, receptive. At some point, you are in front of something that you cannot ignore.” “Man Alone” comprises photographs Wessel made of men in San Francisco. What at first seems a study of the gesture and gait of the urban man is actually a collection of individuals: each man’s singularity is described through the interrelatedness of stride, garb, facial expression and the shape of the photo. Wessel’s final series “Botanical Census” meanders through city streets, parks, roadsides and open fields. Images of bushes, succulents, trees, topiary and weeds, rendered by sharp-edged light, reveal the aesthetic possibilities growing all around us.

In 2012 Wessel assembled INCIDENTS, a book of 27 previously unpublished photographs. Decisive and succinct, each incident is laid down with the aesthetic immediacy of a snapshot, recalling Garry Winogrand’s quote that “there is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.” As Wessel stated in a recent interview: “We can recognize and name what has been described but not what just happened, not what is going on, not what is about to happen. Once you accept the idea that all photographs are fictions, analogies for the things they represent, then you are more receptive to the meaning that is being suggested by that analogy, by that fiction. To be more specific, photographs are about something that would not exist without the photograph.”