Real Estate #909617 1990

This is a photograph, made by Henry Wessel. The bleached-out Southern California sun, the way the colors mute together, it's all part of a feeling. The house itself is pretty standard, but it's the colors and the light that give it this eerie, dreamlike quality. I'm drawn to that splash of red on the steps. It's this unexpected jolt, a little off-kilter, but it brings the whole image into focus. It's like a painter adding a dab of contrasting color to make everything else sing. The paint looks freshly applied, but in some way looks old and tired at the same time. Maybe that's the point, this tension between something new and something old, like the way a house holds memories, even when it's been freshly painted. It reminds me a little of some of the New Topographics photographers, like Robert Adams, who were also interested in these everyday, overlooked spaces. But Wessel has this way of finding the poetry in the mundane, that's all his own. I think that’s where the magic lies - in seeing the world with fresh eyes, and finding beauty in the unexpected.