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Soft Eyes by Henry Wessel, Austin Leong & Adrian Martinez.
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Henry Wessel, Austin Leong & Adrian Martinez
Deadbeat Club, Los Angeles, CA, 2024. 84 pp., 11½x11½".
Soft Eyes presents a selection of photographs by the late Henry Wessel, alongside those by California-based photographers Austin Leong and Adrian Martinez, in an immaculately designed and thoughtfully curated volume that synthesizes rather than juxtaposes the unique sensibilities of these remarkable photographers.
In 1969, at the age of twenty-seven, Wessel arrived in California from Rochester, New York. He settled in Point Richmond and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute for the next forty years. Leong (b. 1990) and Martinez (b. 1990) grew up in Anaheim and Los Angeles respectively, both relocating to San Francisco in the five-year window between 2003 and 2008. What unifies these three photographers is their affinity for capturing California’s crisp, stark light on the textured surfaces of their surroundings. This carries through the selection of photographs, which are sequenced without accompanying dates or attributions. The photographs retrace the neighborhoods Wessel once frequented, and to which Leong and Martinez now turn their lenses.
Throughout Soft Eyes, there is a noticeable contrast between the photographs that convey the expanse of California’s car-friendly terrain and those that capture interpersonal encounters. This mirrors how Wessel frequently took photographs from his car but on occasion would emerge from his vehicle to make further frames on foot. Like Wessel, Leong’s work is occasionally framed by the passenger-side door or windscreen of his car. At other times, individual subjects fill the composition. In an interesting triangulation of images, Wessel depicts a woman resting upon a blanket spread in disarray upon the sand. Later, the shadow of Leong’s bicycled figure encroaches on a man splayed on the sidewalk, apparently sunbathing. In a subsequent frame, Martinez focuses upon a child lying awkwardly, and somewhat ominously, at the foot of a staircase leading to the beach. In each instance, the ambiguity invites us to draw our own conclusions.
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Interstitial space, where the built environment abuts abundant natural growth, is another theme throughout Soft Eyes. To this end, Martinez depicts foliage perforating a geodesic dome containing the remainder of a tree, suggesting a glacial transference of power. Elsewhere, in a photograph by Leong, a large plant appears to explode through the breeze-block wall of a parking lot; the shadows of its fronds radiate outward, as if from the percussive force of the impact. Several frames later, in an image of a suburban homestead by Wessel, a shrub that has had one quadrant abruptly excised is made whole again by its own shadow. These slower images perhaps best exemplify Wessel’s conviction that the meaning of a photograph is elucidated from a combination of its appearance, the experiential knowledge of the viewer, and the viewer’s imagination.
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Time and again, humor serves as the inter-connective tissue between the work of Leong, Martinez, and Wessel. In the yard of a bungalow, a small cat sits discreetly against a white picket fence. Nearby, a hanging sign reads “Little Honker’. Elsewhere, the outline of a leg, whose figure vanishes into the walled entrance of a property, is mimicked by the trailing arm of a plant that projects outward from the same property, casting a wide arc from above the street as if to avoid detection. A few frames later, the larger of two dogs peers into the dark interior of a structure through missing slats at the base of one of its doors. Meanwhile, a smaller canine peers down on it, apparently undetected, from the apex of its roof. These photographs exemplify each photographer’s acute receptivity to narrative within the infinite and forever evolving permutations of their surroundings.
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Soft Eyes culminates in an insightful essay by curator Allie Haeusslein, which dives deeper into the actively receptive state of ‘soft eyes’, a phrase coined by Wessel. He spoke at length about the importance of making an image as soon as interest registers, without deliberation or further investigation. Multiple works by Leong and Martinez demonstrate their adherence to this approach, and this overarching connection serves as the progenitor of the connections that follow:
“You’re kind of like a free agent between your instinct, your anticipation, and your intelligence, and all of those things… keep continually moving back and forth in a fluid way while you’re photographing”.Soft Eyes is Todd Hido’s choice for Favorite Photobook of 2024, appearing alongside three other titles from standout publisher Deadbeat Club. Soft Eyes, however, is unique for drawing together the work of three photographers within a volume that is undeniably greater than the sum of its parts. The images by Leong, Martinez, and Wessel are shaped in part by California’s sunlight, but more so by Wessel’s philosophy. For these reasons, Soft Eyes has also proven to be my favorite photobook of 2024.
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Jacques Talbot is a photographer and writer based in Kingston, Ontario. His writing can be found in Border Crossings, Sculpture magazine, and the American Review of Canadian Studies.