Henry Wessel's Career Laid Out in Prints and Books at the Grolier Club

Loring Knoblauch reviews Henry Wessel: Photographs and Books at the Grolier Club in New York, on view until November 14. The show gathers 53 black-and-white and color photographs by Wessel, drawn entirely from the collection of Jack Gray, once his student at the San Francisco Art Institute. Gray owns the entire 27-image Incidents set from 2012, which Wessel called fictional analogies, leaving the viewer to make sense of the possibilities. Glass cases intermingle prints with magazines, books and maquettes. With no comprehensive institutional retrospective since Wessel died in 2018, Knoblauch finds the show expands beyond his early California work to Richmond houses, Los Angeles at night and Las Vegas.