Henry Wessel

Henry Wessel - Study of psychology and photography; pictures of human buildings

Henry Wessel was born on 28th July 1942 in Teaneck, New Jersey, USA. He spent his childhood and youth in the rural surroundings of his hometown before earning his bachelor's degree in psychology at Pennsylvania State University and finally studying photography at New York State University. After graduating with a master's degree in photography, Wessel moved to Los Angeles to further his career as a photographer. Early on, he showed an interest in subjects that had previously received little attention from photographers and photographed a landscape that his contemporaries had previously not perceived as a landscape at all: streets, house facades and garage driveways formed the centre of his work, in which he was influenced by role models such as Robert Frank, Wright Morris and Garry Winogrand. By his own admission, it was above all the inhospitable conditions of a harsh Californian winter that led Henry Wessel to these unconventional motifs out of necessity.

Motorways and hiking trails lead to a new kind of photography

Henry Wessel's first works attracted so much attention and recognition that he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971, thanks to which he was able to realise his dream project of the elaborate photographic documentation of landscapes along American motorways. As one of the leading figures of the New Topographic Movement, Wessel was also concerned in highlighting the impact of human civilisation on previously untouched nature. In addition to motorways, he was fascinated by the so-called Continental Divide, a 5000-kilometre hiking trail that runs from Canada to Mexico. Wessel travelled this route for several years and took countless photographs of the changing landscape. He created fascinating photographic documents of the vastness and emptiness that only the American West can offer in this form. And in all this supposed untouchedness, there is always a human presence, whose traces Wessel revealed with unerring intuition.

The new view of the everyday opens up artistic spaces

Henry Wessel found a special aesthetic in everyday life, which he explored with his camera and to which he lent his very own meaning with the artist's eye. The profane took on enormous proportions and became a monument. Things like the view from a car window, which many thousands of Americans take for granted day in, day out, became a work of art through Wessel's photography. As part of his Traffic project, the artist photographed the passing traffic during his frequent car journeys to San Francisco. Spontaneity, liveliness and sometimes chaos characterise these images and at the same time often possess an unexpected intimacy when the photographer's camera gets very close to the interior of the passing cars and captures events that would otherwise be lost in the constant stream of traffic.

Henry Wessel died on 20th September 2018 in Point Richmond in California.