Henry Wessel

Containing 133 photographs, this book offers an insight into Wessels work, from his early photographs in the 1960s to his most recent series in Las Vegas, 2000 2004. In Wessels images the idiosyncrasies and anomalies of Southern California and the American West are chronicled with a wry objectivity. Insightful and often ironic, these photographs demonstrate that photography can surpass its documentary role to embrace speculation and suggest narrative. Ultimately the work challenges not only our expectations of the photographic medium, but our ways ofseeing and our preconceptions about the familiar. Wessels 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. From the introductory essay by Sandra Phillips, Curator of Photography at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.