Henry Wessel, Jr. (born 1942 in Teaneck, New Jersey) is an American photographer noted for his descriptive, yet poetic photographs of the human environment. He is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and three National Endowment for the Arts grants. His photographs are included in the permanent collections of major American, European, and Asian museums. Wessel's first solo exhibition was curated by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1972 and he was one of ten photographers included in the influential New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape exhibition at George Eastman House in 1975. His work has since been frequently and widely exhibited, including solo exhibitions at the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Wessel has also produced a number of books of his photography. On the work of Henry Wessel, Senior Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Sandra S. Phillips wrote, "Wessel's remarkable work, witty, evocative and inventive, is distinctive and at the same time a component part of the great development of photography which flourished in the 1970s. The pictures continue to grow and evolve and the work is now regarded as an individual important contribution to twentieth century American photography