Henry Wessel, Jr. (born 1942 in Teaneck, New Jersey[1]) is an American photographer noted for his descriptive, yet poetic photographs of the human environment.
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Wessel earned a B.A. degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1966 and an M.F.A. degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1972. Before graduating with his M.F.A., in 1971, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Wessel a fellowship and, one year later, the Museum of Modern Art exhibited his photographs. In short order, Wessel's work was included in exhibits at the International Museum of Photography and collected by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Visiting California in 1970, Wessel was taken by the West Coast light and moved to San Francisco. Today, Wessel is on faculty in the photography department of San Francisco Art Institute. Much of Wessel's work is still produced in California. To date, Wessel has produced five books of photography. In 2007, Henry Wessel will be exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
^ Gefter, Philip. "Henry Wessel: Capturing the Image, Transcending the Subject", The New York Times, May 21, 2006. Accessed November 8, 2007. On his method of working- "....it has to do with the discipline of being actively receptive. At the core of this receptivity is a process that might be called soft eyes. It is a physical sensation. You are not looking for something. You are open, receptive. At some point you are in front of something that you cannot ignore."
Phillips, Sandra, HENRY WESSEL, published Steidl and SFMOMA 2007 from the Introduction: "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 and important contribution to twentieth-century American photography."