Excerpt from book:

Henry Wessel is indebted to the most varied of sources for the inner consistency and clarity of his photographs. Not all of them bear clear witness to these sources, as is the case with the above-mentioned San Francisco portrait, and a 1975 photograph from Nevada (plate no. 116). Here we look between two houses at an undefined and apparently not very inter- esting landscape. Behind the houses runs the border between California and Nevada, something which Wessel was not aware of at the time. With a bit of imagination, the image could be seen as a portrait that metaphorically seizes the gaze of the older man: He is looking at an overcast sky, the cables could be interpreted as life lines, the split between the houses suggests a rather narrow time-window this could be a symbolic representation of a man whose life is coming to an end. His silhouette stands out from the house façade in pleasing clarity, his shadow parallels that of the house, while his feet are unpleasantly cropped. As Wessel was starting to take the photograph, this man came along, stopped, his hands in his trousers pockets, and allowed his gaze to follow that of the photographer. With the best will in the world, he could not understand what was so interesting about the area between the houses which the stranger was in the process of photographing. Bewildered, he shook his head.

Georg Imdahl