I can only agree with your author (SFMOMA photo curator, Cory Keller) that it is far more densely inhabited than your other works, but for me the effect of this is the opposite of one might expect, what I feel is the loneliness and futility of life in this paradise. Wessel’s good friend Lewis Baltz sent an email to him about the work, which sums it up best: “I feel an elegiac sense in this work that I never saw before when it was intermingled with other images. The book tackles very contemporary issues about identity, culture and our relationship to nature. And that is the last reference to our collective fantasy about Hawaii. It lies on a vast cream background, evocative of the past. The image is smallish, a bit like a snapshot a soldier might send home. A black and white image of palm trees, sand, water with a bit of a hut on the side. The cover invokes the paradise we all hold in our mind from the forties perfectly. It does not include a section from that exhibition of images taken at night, a longtime favorite practice for Wessel. The book was launched with a show in Cologne at the Galerie Thomas Zander last summer. This book chronicles our nostalgia-laden fantasy of paradise in the tropics as it butts up against the reality of Honolulu as a boomtown between the mid-seventies and the mid-eighties. His latest book, Waikiki (Steidl, 2011) is a skillful offering. Henry Wessel creates bodies of photographic images that subtly and effortlessly engage the viewer in a layered experience in a way that many photographers can only dream about accomplishing.
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