Henry Wessel: Incidents

the long version

In 2012 Wessel assembled 'Incidents', a book of 27 previously unpublished photographs. Decisive and succinct, each incident is laid down with the aesthetic immediacy of a snapshot, recalling Garry Winogrand's quote that 'there is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described'. As Wessel stated in a recent interview: 'We can recognize and name what has been described but not what just happened, not what is going on, not what is about to happen. Once you accept the idea that all photographs are fictions, analogies for the things they represent, then you are more receptive to the meaning that is being suggested by that analogy, by that fiction. To be more specific, photographs are about something that would not exist without the photograph.'