A spokesperson says---
"...Henry Wessel – Photographs and Books features more than 65 photographs, including Wessel’s “Incidents” and “Traffic” portfolios in their entirety, and highlights from Wessel’s full body of work from more than four decades...
...making sequences of photographs intended as one work. These were issued as portfolios and published as books with minimal context...
...Untitled (1968), a photograph of a deserted road with mountains in the distance, bisected by a telephone pole...Another enigmatic early work on view, San Francisco (1973), features an older man in a dark suit, seen from behind as he stands on a beach and looks out at the ocean.
...“Traffic,” 28 black and white photographs made in the 1980s and issued as a portfolio in 2017, is limited to images of people in cars, taken from a car...
The “Incidents” portfolio was assembled in 2012 from 27 black and white photographs that Wessel had taken over decades; none had been published or exhibited before. The images are fleeting moments in everyday California life, often bathed in Wessel’s signature bright sunshine, such as Incidents No 5 (undated), in which passengers in a car seem to emerge from the shadows with each closer look.
In the 1990s, Wessel created the “Real Estate” and “Night Walk” projects. “Real Estate” was his first sustained project in color, as he returned to a subject and approach that attracted him from the first roll of film he shot—photographs of houses taken from a car window...
The exhibition also features select work by photographers who inspired Wessel, such as Walker Evans, Weegee, and Helen Leavitt, as well as friends and peers like Tod Papageorge, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander. Publications by German publisher Steidl, which closely collaborated with Wessel to reproduce his work with great attention to detail and minimal text, are also on view, including books of Incidents and Traffic/Sunset Park/Continental Divide..."
