“A bodybuilder in his front yard, an advertisement for ice cream in no-man’s land, an abandoned telephone booth – the obvious and the superficial, the attributes of the everyday, people in strange places doing outlandish things beneath the blazing light of the California sun. The perfectly sharp, immaculately composed black and white photographs of Henry Wessel, co-founder of the “New Topographic” movement in the 1970s, depict the mundane world of American suburbia and its inhabitants with no sugar coating: Surreal and candid, without being moralising, with a good pinch of humour and plenty of empathy for his subjects. Looking at them one is amused to recognise oneself and the triviality of earthly life.”