Hitchhike - Henry Wessel

While attending Penn State University in the early 1960s, Henry Wessel spent his weekends hitchhiking west and back again. Each Friday afternoon, he packed a knapsack, took his camera, and waited for the next ride. By Monday morning he was back for classes, only to leave again the following weekend—a compelling habit for a kid from New Jersey who, until college, had never ventured west of Philadelphia. Somewhere along the way, the desire to explore the medium became inseparable from the search for what lay beyond the life he had known. Photography was no longer simply accompanying the journey; it had become the way he understood it. Wessel would later describe the experience simply: “It’s thrilling to be outside your mind, your eyes far ahead of your thoughts.” That openness defines Hitchhike. Intuitively working while driving or at the roadside, Wessel transformed the overlooked details of the American landscape into photographs of remarkable precision, economy, and wit, allowing chance encounters and fleeting alignments to shape a body of work that remains one of the most distinctive visions of the American road. A long-anticipated publication spanning more than four decades of work, Hitchhike was edited and sequenced by Henry Wessel himself, making it one of the last books he completed before his death. Henry Wessel (1942-2018) is an iconic American photographer who tirelessly photographed the vernacular architecture and social scapes of California after he moved from the East Coast to the Bay Area in 1971. One of the exhibited photographers in the legendary New Topographics exhibition at the George Eastman House’s International Museum of Photography in 1975, he was part of a generation of photographers who disrupted the representation of the American landscape and environment. With a snapshot, low-key aesthetic, Wessel’s photographs combine a deadpan quality and irresistible humor focused on the everyday. Over the course of his career, he received two Guggenheim Fellowships and three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work was the subject of a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 2007 and is in the collections of museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. For more than forty years, Wessel taught in the photography department at the San Francisco Art Institute. From the early 1970s until his passing in 2018, he lived and worked in Point Richmond, California.