A Vigorously Hated Show

Fifty-one years ago, critics couldn't stand Henry Wessel's parking lots. Now they're in a glass case at America's oldest book club.

In October 1975, the George Eastman House in Rochester opened a photography show called New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. Ten photographers, curator William Jenkins, and a room full of parking lots, tract housing, and industrial sheds shot flat and deadpan, with none of the drama landscape photography was supposed to have. People hated it. Frank Gohlke, one of the ten photographers in the show, later called it plainly: "a vigorously hated show." Audiences wanted craft and beauty. They got a gas station.

Henry Wessel was one of those ten. He'd picked up a Leica almost by accident as a student at Penn State, moved to the Bay Area on a Guggenheim, and spent the next four decades photographing California exactly the way the New Topographics show got hated for: flat light, empty streets, nothing staged. He shot his Traffic series straight out the window of his own car, mid-drive. For Night Walks he set up a tripod after dark and photographed houses — just houses, porch lights on, nobody home. He taught at the San Francisco Art Institute for 41 years and said the job was mostly about getting yourself ready: "You can do things to prepare yourself to receive the good luck."

Wessel died in 2018. This month, the Grolier Club — founded in 1884, America's oldest and largest society for bibliophiles, 800-some members deep in collectors, dealers, and librarians — opened Henry Wessel: Photographs and Books, 65 prints across four decades, running through November 14. University of Chicago Press is putting out the catalogue, essays from Sandra Phillips and Tod Papageorge included. Fifty-one years after a room full of people decided this kind of picture wasn't worth looking at, it's under glass at the most exclusive paper-and-ink institution in the country.

Wessel had his own line about what a photograph actually is: "There is the world, and there is the photograph. The photograph is not the world, it's a completely different thing." He spent a career arguing that point to people who wanted the world to look nicer than his pictures let it. The Grolier Club isn't arguing back.