“There is the world, and there is the photograph. The photograph is not the world, it’s a completely different thing,” Henry Wessel (1942-2018) said in a “TateShots” short on the occasion of Tate Modern’s display of his Incidents series in 2014. Today, an exhibition of more than 65 prints titled Henry Wessel — Photographs and Books opens at The Grolier Club, a historic society celebrating the world of books and the graphic arts.
Wessel was a New Jersey native who, after borrowing a Leica camera during his studies at Pennsylvania State University, fell headlong into photography. He rose to prominence in the early 1970s for his black-and-white compositions that plumbed the possibilities of landscape and documentary imagery. Following the receipt of a Guggenheim grant, he moved to the Bay Area, where he taught at the now-defunct San Francisco Art Institute from 1973 to 2014 and captured the area’s characteristically glowing light, historic neighborhoods, and individualistic denizens.
Henry Wessel — Photographs and Books includes the artist’s Incidents and Traffic series in their totality, plus works from his Real Estate and Night Walks series. To make the latter, he would walk around neighborhoods with his tripod and take portraits of local homes after dinner or during the early morning hours.
In Traffic, Wessel snapped scenes and other drivers from his car, capturing candid moments as other vehicles passed or as he encountered roadside curiosities. But he quickly learned that there’s an inherent issue with having to stop the car, get out, and try to capture what you initially saw: it looks totally different.
Wessel began to capture what he saw directly from the driver’s seat, working quickly with the hope that the image would more closely translate his experience. In an SFMOMA interview he said, “You know, like they say, luck is impartial. You have just as much bad luck as you have good luck. But you can do things to prepare yourself to receive the good luck. And that’s part of the whole process of photographing.”
Henry Wessel — Photographs and Books includes some of Wessel’s earliest work, such as “Untitled” from 1968, plus the other series that were created throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The show opens today and continues through November 14 in New York.
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