Born and raised in New Jersey, Henry Wessel (1942-2018) was a photographer who first came to prominence in 1972 with a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art.
Over the course of his career he published a number of books, received two Guggenheim Fellowships and his work is included in the permanent collections of major American, European and Asian museums.
Now, a new exhibition has opened at New York's Grolier Club featuring highlights of his work across four decades. But to me, the most interesting of these centers around a method of taking photographs that few will ever have thought of – and fewer still will probably wish to try.
It came about because, in the early Eighties, Wessel was commuting from his home in the East Bay to a teaching job in San Francisco. One day, he noticed the morning and evening light on that drive was worth stopping for. Except… he never actually stopped.
Instead he prepared his camera for one-handed use, kept it ready in the car, and started photographing other drivers through his own windshield while still behind the wheel.
I'm no driving expert, but that doesn't strike me as a particularly safe thing to do when you're at the helm of a one-ton killing machine.
That aside, the black-and-white photographs he took formed the basis of two landmark portfolios, Incidents (2012) and Traffic (2017). Between them they cover roughly 30 years of pictures that sat unfinished, or simply unshown, long after they were 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 60th Street, New York, NY 10022. Admission is free. The gallery is open Monday to Saturday, 10:00-17:00. A panel discussion on the exhibition takes place on October 28 at 18:30.
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