Henry Wessel Jr
Photographer with an eye for the world around him
Henry Wessel Jr, a distinguished photographer of the American West who captured not so much its vast grandeurasitssmallmoments of daily life – the roadside novelty, the trimmed shrubbery, the man in a business suit on an empty beach – has died at his home in Point Richmond, California. He was 76.
The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, Calvert Barron, his partner of 38 years, said. Wessel had been undergoing treatment for lung cancer.
Wessel, whose work resides alongside that of the most admired artists of his generation, worked in a classic documentary tradition for nearly 50 years, photographing the world as he happened upon it.
Yet his subtle and straightforward observations owed more to the imagist poets, like William Carlos Williams, than photojournalistic reportage. The imagists wrote laconic verse with hard-edge description, creating precision-cut mental images – a quality Wessel’s pictures share.
His spare black-and-white glimpses of vernacular scenes in the American West are characterised by a wry objectivity: the lone sign for “ice” sticking up in an empty desert landscape, a gabled California bungalow obscured by a lawn of uncut, roof-high reeds.
Wessel was never without his Leica and always alert to what was going on.
“Most musicians I know don’t just play music on Saturday night,” he told The New York Times in 2006. “They play music every day. They are always fiddling around, letting the notes lead them from one place to another. Taking still photographs is like that. It is a generative process. It pulls you along.”
He was enthralled by the West from the moment he arrived in Los Angeles in 1969.
“I walked out of the airport into one of those clear, sharpedged January days,” he said. “The light had such physical presence; it looked as though you could lean against it.”
That physicality of light is a feature of so many of his photographs.
“The high Western light that fills his pictures seems almost hallucinatory,” Tod Papageorge, former director of the graduate programme in photography at Yale, wrote in 2006. “I think this had a strong influence on photographers who followed him in the later 70s.”
John Szarkowski, the legendary curator of photography, gave Wessel a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972. He was 30.
The next year, Szarkowski put one of Wessel’s pictures in his seminal book, Looking at Photographs. His work was also included in the 1975 landmark exhibition, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape, in Rochester, New York.
He was also given three retrospective exhibitions – at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1998, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2007, and at Die Photographische Sammlung in Cologne, Germany, in 2007.
In one of his best-known images, Santa Barbara, Calif., 1977, he took a picture of a man standing on a lawn staring at a flock of birds in flight at eye level. Wessel had been standing at a bus stop at the time.
“As I approached, the birds were feeding in the grass,” he said. “Startled for some reason, they took flight. I instinctually shot, exposing three frames before they were gone. When I look at it now, I marvel at how much of the world is hidden in the flux of time.”
Wessel was a cornerstone of the photography programme at the San Francisco Art Institute, joining its faculty in 1973. He taught by example. He made a point of telling students that after he took his pictures, he put them away for a year before he selected images he thought might be enduring.
“If you let some time go by before considering work that you have done, you move toward a more objective position,” he said. “The pleasure of the subjective, physical experience is a more distant memory and less influential.”
By limiting his tools to a single camera, a Leica, with one type of lens, 28 millimetre, his sense of how light translates to film, and then to paper, became instinctive, Wessel said. When photographing, he instructed his students, the most important choices were “where to stand and when to shoot”.
Henry Wessel Jr. was born on July 28, 1942, in Teaneck, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Ridgefield. He studied psychology at Penn State University, graduating in 1966. At an off-campus bookstore he came upon Szarkowski’s book The Photographer’s Eye and through it discovered Eugene Atget, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Wright Morris and Garry Winogrand.
It was such a revelation that he abandoned psychology and pursued photography.
“Hank,” as Wessel was known to friends, was part of a “post-beatnik, pre-hippy ‘downtown’ group,” recalled Susan Kismaric, a former curator of photography at MOMA who attended Penn State at the same time as Wessel in the mid-1960s.
“He had a gigantic white smile and thick dark hair,” she said. “He was very fit riding around on a black motorcycle in his tight black T-shirts and blue jeans. He could be very playful and a lot of fun.”
Lee Friedlander called him the Photo Buddha because “he smiled and laughed all the time”.
Wessel married Meredith Benz in 1969, and they had a son, Nicholas, who survives him. The couple divorced in 1979. Barron is his only other immediate survivor.
Wessel was the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts grants. His work has recently been the subject of monographs and a five-volume set published by Steidl.
In his later years he grew rueful about the multiplicity of images afforded by digital photography.
“People don’t pay much attention these days to the descriptive, expressive and suggestive facts found in a good still photograph,” he said. “The process of photographing is a pleasure: eyes open, receptive, sensing, and at some point, connecting. It’s thrilling to be outside your mind, your eyes far ahead of your thoughts.”
New York Times 2018. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service.