Henry Wessel, Austin Leong, Adrian Martinez: Soft Eyes
Henry Wessel once described his approach to photography as seeing with “soft eyes,” a sensation he characterized as physical. “You are not searching for something,” he explained. “You remain open, receptive. And then, suddenly, you encounter something you cannot ignore.” This thoughtful and heartfelt tribute blends Wessel’s work, much of it previously unseen, with the photography of two younger Californians, Austin Leong and Adrian Martinez. The result is a compelling study of influence and an exploration of the threads that weave through photography’s rich, interconnected history.
In many ways, Soft Eyes presents two photographers following the traces of a departed master. Leong and Martinez, with their precision and dedication, retrace Wessel’s footsteps across the landscapes of Northern and Southern California. His presence lingers in familiar and unexpected places, hiding in plain sight under the relentless California sun. Wessel had a gift for creating striking images from moments that often go unnoticed, his visual language marked by a quiet modesty. In a state famously tied to indulgence, Wessel’s perspective was almost austere, with an understated, even Quaker-like sensibility. He was drawn to ordinary architecture, the mundane, and a kind of static energy that rendered human activity as if frozen in a museum diorama of dreams.
Wessel’s tools—a Leica 35mm camera, a wide-angle lens, and Kodak Tri-X film—were constants throughout his career. He carved out his niche, returning again and again to the same themes and places to plumb their depths. These self-defined boundaries made his work particularly resonant for younger California photographers who continue to explore the terrain he mapped. As Soft Eyes demonstrates, there is still a vast expanse of “Wessel World” waiting to be discovered by those armed with a 35mm camera and a receptive gaze.
The photographs of Leong and Martinez blend seamlessly with Wessel’s own, coexisting naturally while, as curator Allie Haeusslein observes, subtly expanding his singular visual vocabulary into contemporary contexts. Together, they offer a fresh take on the timeless practice of seeing with soft eyes.
About the Authors
Henry Wessel was born in 1942 and raised in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey. 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. His published monographs include Incidents (2013), Waikiki (2011), and a five-volume box set (2005) devoted to his now-iconic bodies of work. 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.
Austin Leong relocated to his father’s hometown of San Francisco at the age of 23 after growing up in Anaheim. He credits skateboarding as the community in which he began looking closely at his surroundings and where his passion for photography first took shape. Leong’s work has been featured and reviewed in The Atlantic, Monthly Photo, Open Space, and the San Francisco Examiner. It has been included in numerous exhibitions throughout the Bay Area, including Looking Forward: Ten Years of Pier 24 Photography, which is on view at Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, through May 2023. Austin also codirects Book and Job Gallery, a photographer-run studio, darkroom, and gallery space in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Adrian Martinez relocated to the Bay Area in 2008 to attend the University of San Francisco and begin developing his practice in earnest. A self-taught photographer, Martinez draws inspiration from the Bay Area’s rich photographic history and present-day community of practitioners. His work has been featured in Open Space and the British Journal of Photography, and exhibited in various group shows. In 2016 he founded illetante books, an independent publishing imprint, as a vehicle through which to collaborate with local artists and colleagues. Examples of his publishing work were included in the 2019 exhibition Printed Publics: Contemporary Art and Design Publishing in the Bay Area at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Martinez also codirects Book and Job Gallery, a photographer-run studio, darkroom, and gallery space in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood.
