NEW YORK, NY.- The Grolier Club presents a spotlight exhibition on photographs and books by Henry Wessel (1942–2018), curated by Grolier Club member Jack Gray from his collection. On view from September 8 through November 14, 2026, in the Club’s Second Floor Gallery, Henry Wessel – Photographs and Books features more than 65 photographs, including Wessel’s “Incidents” and “Traffic” portfolios in their entirety, and highlights from Wessel’s full body of work from more than four decades. A catalogue, published by The Grolier Club, will be available this autumn.
Wessel first came to prominence in 1972 with a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and his practice initially centered on exhibitions with related catalogues. He later moved emphatically to making sequences of photographs intended as one work. These were issued as portfolios and published as books with minimal context.
Curator Jack Gray met the artist in 1976, when he was one of Wessel’s undergraduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute. Gray began to collect Wessel’s work while still a student, and a chance meeting 20 years later led to a close friendship. Wessel’s work now forms the core of Gray’s personal collection. “Hank and I often looked at photographs together. We loved talking about them. A core dialogue centered on a question: What made an interesting photograph?,” writes Gray. “His commitment to making what he called ‘still photographs that function as visual haikus’ was consistent throughout his career.”
Exhibition Highlights
One of Wessel’s earliest works on view is Untitled (1968), a photograph of a deserted road with mountains in the distance, bisected by a telephone pole. This work was featured in MoMA curator John Szarkowski’s influential 1973 book Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art as the last of the 100 images, and Wessel was the youngest photographer included in the book. Another enigmatic early work on view, San Francisco (1973), features an older man in a dark suit, seen from behind as he stands on a beach and looks out at the ocean.
Wessel’s “Traffic” and “Incidents” portfolios are shown in full in the exhibition. “Traffic,” 28 black and white photographs made in the 1980s and issued as a portfolio in 2017, is limited to images of people in cars, taken from a car. Wessel commuted from his East Bay home to his teaching job in San Francisco and discovered that he could take advantage of the morning and evening light to photograph on the road. He prepared the camera for one-handed use—because “a glance was enough”—and soon he was looking forward to the daily drive.
The “Incidents” portfolio was assembled in 2012 from 27 black and white photographs that Wessel had taken over decades; none had been published or exhibited before. The images are fleeting moments in everyday California life, often bathed in Wessel’s signature bright sunshine, such as Incidents No 5 (undated), in which passengers in a car seem to emerge from the shadows with each closer look.
In the 1990s, Wessel created the “Real Estate” and “Night Walk” projects. “Real Estate” was his first sustained project in color, as he returned to a subject and approach that attracted him from the first roll of film he shot—photographs of houses taken from a car window. In 1995, walking his dog at night in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, Wessel became fascinated with how the world is reconfigured by the lights at night, finding inspiration for his “Night Walk” series: “The spot lighting of particular areas, the lack of ambient light, the unnatural way that shadows are cast, all take us to an unfamiliar place, a world that is stage-like with its implied drama.”
The exhibition also features select work by photographers who inspired Wessel, such as Walker Evans, Weegee, and Helen Leavitt, as well as friends and peers like Tod Papageorge, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander. Publications by German publisher Steidl, which closely collaborated with Wessel to reproduce his work with great attention to detail and minimal text, are also on view, including books of Incidents and Traffic/Sunset Park/Continental Divide.
Wessel said, “I don't have an attitude of going out to take pictures. I simply take pictures. If there’s light out and my eyes are open, it’s usually reason enough to be able to work. It’s the facility that the camera provides that makes photography to me a very vital medium, a very challenging medium and in a sense, a very indulgent medium. The preparation to work is almost nonexistent.”
