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Born and raised in New Jersey, Henry Wessel (1942-2018) was a photographer who first got here to prominence in 1972 with a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art.
Over the course of his profession he revealed quite a few books, obtained two Guggenheim Fellowships and his work is included within the everlasting collections of main American, European and Asian museums.
Now, a brand new exhibition has opened at New York’s Grolier Club that includes highlights of his work throughout 4 many years. But to me, probably the most fascinating of those facilities round a way of taking pictures that few will ever have considered – and fewer nonetheless will in all probability want to attempt.
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It took place as a result of, within the early Eighties, Wessel was commuting from his dwelling within the East Bay to a educating job in San Francisco. One day, he observed the morning and night mild on that drive was value stopping for. Except… he by no means truly stopped.
Instead he ready his digital camera for one-handed use, saved it prepared within the automobile, and began photographing different drivers by his personal windshield whereas nonetheless behind the wheel.
I’m no driving skilled, however that does not strike me as a very protected factor to do if you’re on the helm of a one-ton killing machine.
That apart, the black-and-white pictures he took shaped the premise of two landmark portfolios, Incidents (2012) and Traffic (2017). Between them they cowl roughly 30 years of images that sat unfinished, or just unshown, lengthy after they have been taken.
Other highlights
Wessel’s earliest work on view predates any of this, although the subject matter is not dissimilar. Untitled (1968), a deserted road split by a telephone pole, was chosen by MoMA curator John Szarkowski as the final image in his influential 1973 book, Looking at Photographs, and Wessel was the youngest photographer included in it.
San Francisco (1973), showing a man in a suit photographed from behind on a beach, is another early highlight from the period that Wessel joined the faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he went on to teach for four decades.
The Nineties brought two further shifts. Real Estate, his first sustained project in color, returned him to houses shot from a car window, a subject that had interested him since his very first roll of film, though this time the car stayed parked rather than moving.
Night Walk followed in 1995, after Wessel started noticing how streetlights reconfigured his own neighborhood while walking his dog after dark. He described the effect as “stage-like,” full of “implied drama” created entirely by where the light happened to fall.
The exhibition also places Wessel alongside the photographers who shaped him – Walker Evans, Weegee and Helen Levitt among them – along with contemporaries including Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, and includes the Steidl-published books that later carried his sequences into print with almost no accompanying text.
Which feels quite fitting, for a photographer who once said, “I simply take pictures.” What he meant by that was, he didn’t purposely go out to shoot.
“If there’s light out and my eyes are open, it’s usually reason enough to be able to work,” he explained. “It’s the facility that the camera provides that makes photography to me a very vital medium, a very challenging medium and in a sense, a very indulgent medium. The preparation to work is almost nonexistent.”
Henry Wessel: Photographs and Books runs until November 14 at The Grolier Club, 47 East sixtieth Street, New York, NY 10022. Admission is free. The gallery is open Monday to Saturday, 10:00-17:00. A panel dialogue on the exhibition takes place on October 28 at 18:30.
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