Overview

The first complete retrospective on the Bay Area New Topographics photographer. In 1975, curator William Jenkins noticed that a slew of American photographers possessed a similar documentarian aesthetic - direct, mostly black-and-white prints of urban landscapes, executed with an ironic, at times, critical eye - and famously dubbed this aesthetic the New Topographics. Bay Area photographer Henry Wessel (1942–2018) was counted among the group's ranks, along with Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott and Stephen Shore. Known for his black-and-white images of the American West, Wessel's work closely aligns with Jensen's description. Exploring the territory where nature and culture meet, Wessel spontaneously captured scenes from everyday life, sometimes incorporating touches of deadpan humour in the process. Unlike some of the other New Topographic photographers, however, he still paid considerable attention to form and light - unwilling to fully cede stylised interventions. As he traversed the West, Wessel developed a repertoire of motifs - including shrubbery, parking lots and beachgoers - transmuting banal subjects into a personal poetry. Henry Wessel: Documentary Style and Beyond presents a survey of the photographer's work, compiling a selection of his most representative images. The volume also includes photographs by other great figures of American documentary photography, such as Ed Ruscha, Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus. AUTHOR: Henry Wessel (United States, 1942-2018) belongs to the group of photographers brought together in the influential exhibition at the George Eastman House in Rochester in 1975, ""New Topographics"", whose work engages in the relationship of nature and civilization. His photographs are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the George Eastman House in Rochester in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, among others. SELLING POINTS: . Henry Wessel was an American photographer and part of the New Topographics group, a nontraditional style of black-and-white photography depicting the American West landscape . Hardcover, fully illustrated, the only in-print overview of Henry Wessel's work. The volume includes work by other photographers, such as Ed Ruscha, Lee Friedlander and Diane Airbus, among others, showing Wessel's unique style in the context of documentary photography of the period 90 images

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