Henry Wessel: Photographs and Books at the Grolier Club
Henry Wessel, Incidents No 5, no date, gelatin silver print
The Grolier Club's forthcoming Henry Wessel – Photographs and Books exhibition will feature more than 65 photographs including Wessel’s Incidents and Traffic portfolios in their entirety, as well as highlights from Wessel’s full body of work from more than four decades.
Wessel (1942–2018) first came to prominence in 1972 with a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and his practice initially centered on exhibitions with related catalogues. He later moved to making sequences of photographs intended as one work. These were issued as portfolios and published as books with minimal context.
Running September 8 through November 14, it is curated by Grolier Club member Jack Gray from his collection. Gray met the artist in 1976 when he was one of Wessel’s undergraduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute and began to collect Wessel’s work while still a student. A chance meeting 20 years later led to a close friendship.
“Hank and I often looked at photographs together," he said. "We loved talking about them. A core dialogue centered on the question of what made an interesting photograph. His commitment to making what he called "still photographs that function as visual haikus" was consistent throughout his career.”
Highlights include:
- Traffic, 28 black and white photographs made in the 1980s and issued as a portfolio in 2017, which is limited to images of people in cars, taken from a car one-handed
- the Incidents portfolio, assembled in 2012 from 27 black and white photographs that Wessel had taken over decades of fleeting moments in everyday California life
- one of Wessel’s earliest works, Untitled (1968), a photograph of a deserted road with mountains in the distance, bisected by a telephone pole
- San Francisco (1973), features an older man in a dark suit, seen from behind as he stands on a beach and looks out at the ocean
The exhibition also features work by photographers who inspired Wessel including Walker Evans, Weegee, and Helen Leavitt, as well as friends and peers Tod Papageorge, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander.
