Henry Wessel

The objective for Five Books was to create a slipcase housing individual volumes, each dedicated to a particular theme: "California and the West”, "Odd Photos”, "Las Vegas”, "Real Estate Photographs"and "Night Walk”.

Five Books represents Wessel's sustained effort to describe the contemporary vernacular landscape of Southern California and the American West. From his early work in the 1970s to his series in Las Vegas of the early 2000s, Wessel's wit and insight illuminate the unusual and iconic in a world rich in nuance, humor and irony.

New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975) is the seminal exhibition catalog published by the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House for the groundbreaking exhibition curated by William Jenkins.

The catalog documents a pivotal shift in 20th-century American landscape photography away from the idealized, majestic wilderness traditions of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Instead, it features artists who approached the modern built environment with deadpan neutrality, clinical detachment, and objective, documentary precision.

The featured photographers, Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, systematically recorded suburban suburban sprawl, industrial parks, highway strip developments, housing developments, and motels across the American West and industrial centers.

Rather than seeking untouched natural beauty, the project examines the visual reality of human intrusion, suburban expansion, and land development. Images are characterized by a banality of subject matter, rigid geometric composition, wide-angle or large-format clarity, and an intentional lack of drama, sentimentality, or overt emotional commentary. Influenced heavily by Bernd and Hilla Becher's systematic documentation of industrial structures in Europe, the catalog emphasizes seriality, architectural forms, and comparative observation.

New Topographics fundamentally redefined how landscape photography was understood and practiced. By elevating ordinary, human-altered environments to formal art, it influenced generations of photographers and remains one of the most important intellectual and aesthetic turning points in contemporary photography.

Henry Wessel’s Hitchhike operates as a foundational prequel to the artist's celebrated career, capturing the genesis of his lifelong engagement with the American landscape. Photographed in the early 1960s while Wessel was an undergraduate student in Pennsylvania, the series documents his weekend hitchhiking trips westward. During these journeys, the camera transformed from a mere documentary tool into an essential apparatus for understanding the vastness of his surroundings. Meticulously edited and sequenced by Wessel himself over four decades before his passing in 2018, the project encapsulates a critical period of self-discovery, laying the conceptual groundwork for the deadpan humor and rigorous observation that would later define his New Topographics legacy.

Aesthetically, the work reveals a photographer discovering the physical weight and clarity of western light. The imagery chronicles the vernacular architecture of the road, gas stations, open highways, solitary trees, and roadside diners, with a quiet, unfolding rhythm. Wessel’s compositions remain straightforward and unpretentious, relying on stark duotone contrast and deliberate framing to isolate ordinary moments of transition. The resulting sequence eschews romanticized travelogues in favor of a clear, objective vernacular, balancing the transient nature of a road trip with the strict geometric discipline that would eventually become his hallmark.

Wessel’s Waikiki stems from his trips to Honolulu during the late 1970s and early 1980s. As a central figure of the New Topographics movement, Wessel applied his characteristically wry, observational approach, typically reserved for the arid American West, to the highly commercialized tropical landscape of Hawaii. The series isolates the friction between the organic environment and the aggressive expansion of the manufactured leisure industry.

The book sequences these observations to document the peculiar sociology of tourists, concrete resort architecture, and the omnipresent glare of the Pacific sun. Rather than presenting a romanticized island paradise, the volume catalogs the banal and often surreal intersections of paved surfaces, sunburned vacationers, and manicured flora, capturing the artificiality of the modern vacation experience.

First edition about the iconic catalog of the 1975 photography show held at the IMP, at the G. Eastman House in Rochester, NY.