Henry Wessel: Photographs and Books, on view at The Grolier Club's Second Floor Gallery from September 8 to November 14, 2026, presents a spotlight exhibition on the work of Henry Wessel (1942–2018), who first came to prominence in 1972 with a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Curated by Grolier Club member Jack Gray from his personal collection, the exhibition features more than 65 photographs including Wessel's Incidents and Traffic portfolios in their entirety, alongside highlights from more than four decades of work. A catalogue published by the Grolier Club accompanies the show.
Wessel's practice initially centered on exhibitions with related catalogs, but he later moved emphatically to making sequences of photographs explicitly intended as one work, issued as portfolios and published as books with minimal context. Gray met the artist in 1976 as one of Wessel's undergraduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute and began collecting his work while still a student. A chance meeting twenty years later led to a close friendship, with Wessel's photographs forming the core of Gray's collection. The two often looked at photographs together, engaging in a dialogue centered on what made an interesting photograph. Wessel's commitment to what he called still photographs that function as visual haikus remained consistent throughout his career.
Among the earliest works on view is Untitled from 1968, a photograph of a deserted road with mountains in the distance, bisected by a telephone pole. This image appeared as the last of 100 pictures in MoMA curator John Szarkowski's influential 1973 book Looking at Photographs, with Wessel the youngest photographer included. The Traffic portfolio comprises 28 black-and-white photographs made in the 1980s, all images of people in cars taken from a car during Wessel's commute from his East Bay home to his teaching job in San Francisco. He prepared his camera for one-handed use, finding that a glance was enough to capture the morning and evening light on the road.
The Incidents portfolio, assembled in 2012 from 27 black-and-white photographs taken over decades, presents fleeting moments in everyday California life, often bathed in Wessel's signature bright sunshine. In the 1990s, he created Real Estate, his first sustained project in color, returning to photographs of houses taken from a car window, and Night Walk, inspired by walking his dog at night in Los Angeles's Sunset Park neighborhood, where he became fascinated with how spot lighting and unnatural shadows reconfigured the world into something stage-like. The exhibition also features select work by photographers who inspired Wessel, including Walker Evans, Weegee, and Helen Levitt, 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, are on view alongside the photographs.
Image: Henry Wessel, Incidents No 5; Gelatin Silver Print; No Date/Copyright The Estate of Henry Wessel.
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