A photographer whose fascinating images of everyday life in California — taken from behind the wheel of his car on his daily drive to work — are the focus of a new exhibition.
The Grolier Club, a museum and private club in New York, is presenting a spotlight exhibition of images by acclaimed American photographer Henry Wessel, who passed away in 2018. The exhibit Henry Wessel: Photographs and Books brings together Wessel’s photo series Incidents as well as Traffic series in their entirety, alongside work from several other projects. The exhibition will be on view from September 8 through November 14 in The Grolier Club’s Second Floor Gallery.
Wessel’s photographs often focused on ordinary moments rather than staged scenes. His Incidents and Traffic series capture people commuting, socializing, relaxing, and simply going about their day as he explored California. He worked largely on instinct, sometimes photographing through the open window of his car.
‘A Glance was Enough’
Traffic, a series of 28 black-and-white photographs made in the 1980s and issued as a portfolio in 2017, focuses entirely on people in cars, photographed from another car. Wessel commuted from his East Bay home to his teaching job in San Francisco and realized that the morning and evening light gave him an opportunity to photograph while on the road. He adapted his camera for one-handed use because “a glance was enough,” allowing him to photograph from behind the wheel.
Wessel soon began looking forward to his daily commute, where he found opportunities to photograph the people and scenes around him. For Wessel, photography was an immediate way to capture whatever caught his eye.
“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,” Weessel said, according to a press release by The Grolier Club. “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.”…