Henry Wessel (July 28, 1942 – September 20, 2018) was an American photographer and educator. He made “obdurately spare and often wry black-and-white pictures of vernacular scenes in the American West”.
Wessel produced a number of books of photography. He was the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and three National Endowment for the Arts grants and his work is included in the permanent collections of major American, European, and Asian museums.
His first solo exhibition was curated by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1972 and he was one of ten photographers included in the influential New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape exhibition at George Eastman House in 1975. His work has since been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Wessel was emeritus professor of art at San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught from 1973 to 2014.
Table of Contents
- 1 Life and work
- 1.1 New Topographics. Photographs of a man-altered landscape. Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel, jr.
- 1.2 New Topographics: Roberts Adams . Lewis Baltz . Bernd and Hilla Becher . Joe Deal . Frank Gohlke . Nicholas Nixon . John Schott . Stephen Shore . Henry Wessel, Jr. by Britt Salvesen, Alison Nordstr?m (2009) Hardcover
- 1.3 New Topographics: Roberts Adams . Lewis Baltz . Bernd and Hilla Becher . Joe Deal . Frank Gohlke . Nicholas Nixon . John Schott . Stephen Shore . Henry Wessel, Jr. by Britt Salvesen (2009-12-28)
- 1.4 Ghost Towns of the American Gold Rush
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- 1.6 Slim
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Life and work
Wessel was born in Teaneck, New Jersey and raised in Ridgefield. He graduated from Pennsylvania State University in 1966, where he discovered his lifelong career inclusion through an court case with a comport yourself of photographs he picked going on in a compilation store near the campus, which led him to step down from his previous assimilation in psychology. Throughout his career he used and no-one else one camera and one type of film: a Leica 35 mm camera in imitation of a 28 mm wide-angle lens and Kodak Tri-X film.
Wessel was emeritus professor of art at San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught from 1973 to 2014.
Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art wrote, “Wessel’s remarkable work, witty, evocative and inventive, is distinctive and at the similar time a component allocation of the great development of photography which flourished in the 1970s. The pictures continue to add and take forward and the con is now regarded as an individual important contribution to twentieth century American photography.
Wessel died at the age of 76 in his house in Point Richmond, Richmond, California from pulmonary fibrosis upon September 21, 2018.
Last update 2021-08-06