Lot 116 D

Contents:
Walapai, Arizona, 1971; Southern California, 1985; California, 1973; Tucson, Arizona, 1976; Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1968; Pasadena, Los Angeles, 1974; Las Vegas, 1973; Buena Vista, Colorado, 1973; Tucson, Arizona, 1974; Oklahoma, 1975; Nevada, 1975; Santa Monica, California, 1989; Waikiki, 1978; Santa Barbara, California, 1977; San Francisco, 1974

Following a degree in photography from the State University in New York, Wessel moved to California in 1969 where he devoted himself to a new form of photography influenced by the light and visual stimuli of the barren landscape. His experience of the West Coast was of such radical significance for Wessel that he emphatically describes it in the foreword to his book 'California and the West': “I walked out of the airport into one of those clear sharp-edged January days. The light had such a physical presence; it looked as though you could lean against it. The long shadows of axial sunlight were fracturing the landscape, lighting faces like an on-camera flash, every surface detailed and separate. As I stood there, I wanted to photograph everything in front of me.” (Henry Wessel, loc.cit., n.pag.)
Together with Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Stephen Shore as well as Bernd and Hilla Becher - whose photographs are equally characterised by a sober, documentational view of a landscape transformed by the human hand with industrial wastelands and suburbs - Wessel's works were shown in 1975 at the exhibition 'New Topographics: Photographs of the Man-Altered Landscape' at George Eastman House in Rochester, giving the name to this photographic movement which had decisively influenced the style of photography in the USA.