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.

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 interest through an encounter with a work of photographs he picked up in a book store near the campus, which led him to give up his previous interest in psychology. Throughout much of his career he used only one camera and one type of film: a Leica 35 mm camera with a 28 mm wide-angle lens and Kodak Tri-X film. His later work did incorporate color. 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 same time a component part of the great development of photography which flourished in the 1970s. The pictures continue to grow and evolve and the work is now regarded as an individual important contribution to twentieth century American photography. Wessel died at the age of 76 in his home in Point Richmond, Richmond, California from pulmonary fibrosis on September 21, 2018.

Publications

Publications by Wessel

Publications with contributions by Wessel

Exhibitions

Solo

Group

Awards

Collections

Wessel's work is held in the following public collections: • Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois • Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas • Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia • Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California • California Historical Society, San Francisco, California • Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California • Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado • Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts • George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York • Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York • Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA • Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California • Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts • Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas • Museum of Modern Art, New York City • National Gallery of Art, Washington DC • National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada • Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California • Oakland Museum of California, California • Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania • Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California • Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington • Tate Modern, London • Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Japan • Whitney Museum of American Art, New York • Victoria and Albert Museum, London