Another Richmond artist has hit the big time but still hangs out in a community within a community that makes Richmond, perhaps better known for homicides and refinery explosions, the unique place we all know it to be. Read on from recent articles in the Contra Costa Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

AN ONLINE BOOK BUYER in Atlanta was enthralled by the boxed set of photo books he purchased, with images ranging from Las Vegas hotel corridors to a towering gas station sign in the Central Valley to a series of forlorn bungalows in Richmond.

Then he posted a five-star review on Amazon's Web site.

"Who is this Photographer?" he asked. "He's great!"

He is Henry Wessel, who settled in Point Richmond in 1971 and landed his first New York museum exhibit the following year. Yet he remains the least-well-known of Bay Area photographers who have stellar reputations in the art world.

Wessel, who is now in his mid-60s, is about to reach a mass market compared to the rarefied world of photography galleries. He's being featured in five galleries in the United States and Europe, he's the subject of a new book and -- closer to home -- a retrospective of some 80 photographs opening Saturday at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

"I think he's a wonderful artist," says museum curator Sandra Phillips, "and I think it's fabulous he's around to enjoy this."

"The critical mass is really going to be great," says Mary Dohne of the Charles Cowles Gallery, one of two New York City galleries that opened exhibits of Wessel's photographs last week. It was originally scheduled last year, but postponed to coincide with the S.F. Museum of Modern Art retrospective and the publicity it would garner in the art world.

The museum curator who is organizing the Wessel exhibit, Corey Keller, calls it a "long overdue look at this remarkable career."

Wessel sidled into his current bout with celebrity with an early assist from galleries and curators in Germany, where straight-on photographic portraits of old buildings and landmarks are a 20th century tradition. It was a German publisher, Steidl, that published the five-volume set of his photographs last year. That led to a story in the New York Times -- and that rave review on Amazon.

"He is having his moment," says Trish Bransten of San Francisco's Rena Bransten Gallery, where a selection of Wessel's early photographs is on view. "He's always worked on making the invisible visible, which I think is a focus of artists working today. It's sort of postmodern."

Santa Monica gallery owner Theresa Luisotti, who is offering another Wessel exhibit, agrees.

"He photographs the mundane, the scene that you walk by a million times every day," Luisotti says. "But he finds that very decisive moment, when the mundane has volume, has interest," she says. "Suddenly it has context. It talks back to you."

He doesn't talk much about his work -- "the only thing I have to say is in my photographs," Wessel says in politely declining a request for a full-length interview -- but he agreed that a writer and photographer could join him as he helped arrange the Museum of Modern Art exhibit. He was working with Phillips, senior curator of photography.

Wessel, wearing a faded yellow hooded sweatshirt over khaki pants with a museum "guest" badge stuck on his chest, had just driven into the city and downed an espresso before surveying the galleries, with his photographs propped against the wall around the perimeter.

After all these years, what does he think of Richmond as a photographic site? "I'm photographing there all the time," he says. "I photographed on the way in -- I don't mind being stuck in traffic if I can photograph."

The museum exhibit opening Saturday includes a wall filled with 40 color images of modest, forlorn-looking houses on the south side of Richmond that he photographed in 1992.

"I got to them just in time," he says. "Now they're surrounded by fences and iron grates and recycling containers." Another big change is their value. He remembers one of the houses for sale for $25,000. "I checked recently, and it was $425,000," he says.

When Wessel's boxed set of photography books was released last year -- winning that rave review on Amazon -- one arts writer noted that he was "not widely known to the public."

Here's how that may change in the coming months:

• "Henry Wessel: Photographs," opening at the S.F. Museum of Modern Art on Saturday and running through April 22, includes approximately 80 works spanning his entire career.

• Five galleries are featuring his work: the Rena Bransten in San Francisco, through Feb. 24; Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica, through March 10; the Robert Mann Gallery in New York, through Feb. 10; the Charles Cowles Gallery in New York, through Feb. 17; and more than 200 of Wessel's images at Die Photographische Sammlung in Cologne, Germany, Feb. 2 through May 6.

• A new book simply titled "Henry Wessel," due from the publisher Steidl on April 1, includes 133 of his photographs and a 7,400-word essay by Phillips, the S.F. Museum of Modern Art curator. Phillips traces his life and his career from the beginning: Wessel was born in 1942, raised in Ridgefield Park, N.J., and discovered photography -- with a Leica camera that belonged to his girlfriend's brother -- while he was a student at Pennsylvania State University.

Phillips places Wessel in a context of photographers including Wright Morris, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, and she also mentions the Richmond flatlands as photographed by Dorothea Lange during the 1940s. Wessel's "essential subject," she says, is the California light "that made even -- perhaps especially -- the most banal of subjects wonders to be marveled at."

Luisotti, the Santa Monica gallery owner, grew up in the East Bay and studied under Wessel at the San Francisco Art institute in the mid-1970s. When she opened a gallery in the mid-1980s, she focused on West Coast photographers -- Wessel among them.

Wessel might be better-known today if he had remained in New York -- then the center of the American art world -- in the 1970s. "A lot of great photographers of the West suffered because they were not in New York," she says. But now, in photography, "California is a powerhouse."

Vintage prints of Wessel's photographs at Gallery Luisotti are priced from $3,300 to $20,000.

"All these exhibits are very exciting," Luisotti says. "It's so fulfilling that now more and more collectors come knocking at my door and say, 'Show me Henry Wessel's work.'"

Back in the S.F. Museum of Modern Art galleries, Wessel is helping arrange and slightly rearrange his photographs for the exhibit. There are these images of precisely manicured shrubs, as well as vast roadside vistas punctuated by a single sign or distant cars.

Now and then, Wessel talks about the photos' subjects and his life in the Bay Area. He decided to settle in Point Richmond, he says, when a friend asked him to deliver a package when he arrived in the Bay Area. He was looking for a place to rent -- he was living in his van -- and Point Richmond reminded him of the towns in the East where he grew up.

He taught at a number of colleges before settling on the San Francisco Art Institute. "They had the most interesting students, and they wanted working artists who wanted to teach," he says. "I didn't want to get bogged down in the academic world."

Phillips considers Wessel a distinctive photographer, while others discuss his work in relation to social documentaries, the "new topography" of manmade settings and the "snapshot aesthetic."

His philosophy, if he would even call it that, is both more clear and more mysterious.

Wessel looked at his framed images lining the gallery walls and noted that every photograph is a record of a specific time and place. "I'm a still photographer," he says. "Everything existed like this in the physical world. Everything is a move toward clarity."

• WHAT: "Henry Wessel: Photographs"

• WHERE: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., S.F.

• WHEN: Jan. 27-April 22; 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Fridays-Tuesdays, 11 a.m.-8:45 p.m. Thursdays

• HOW MUCH: $7-$12.50

Henry Wessel's photographs look like nothing much at first. But stay with them and they emanate little revelations of their time and of the nature of photography.

Consider a black-and-white picture titled "Pasadena, California" (1974). Here two leggy baton twirlers dressed in white stand in the street, as if marching in place for a moment during a parade. One stretches her arms overhead, baton in hand. The flamelike foliage of a juniper behind her leads the eye further upward to a helicopter distant in the sky above, its propeller a tiny echo of the upraised baton.

In a coincidence completely unrelated -- except that it helps to assert coincidence as this picture's true subject -- the long shadow of a palm tree falls across the street from behind Wessel's camera and laps up the spindly trunk of another palm that snakes upward beyond the frame.

In one of Wessel's most familiar pictures, "Santa Barbara" (1977), a man stands on a threadbare lawn and watches as a flock of birds before him scatters in flight. Stare at the picture for a moment and its stasis -- that plain, definitive photographic fact -- induces a peculiar thought: that Wessel has caught the man in the act of doing by magic what the camera does by nature, freezing the birds' motion for closer study.

A well-known Bay Area photographer, Wessel began taking pictures while a psychology student at Penn State in the mid-'60s. The San Francisco Museum of Art's survey of his work, which opens today, makes it look like a continuation of psychology by other means.

Probing Wessel's pictures acquaints you more closely with your own curiosity, habits of attention and emotional and cultural affinities. For example, where some viewers will see mere emptiness or artistic laziness in Wessel's pictures of signal-heavy rural intersections barren of traffic, others will find concise images of American alienation.

Some may overlook the noir stirrings in a picture such as "Santa Monica, California" (1989), which shows a barebacked young woman passing three pay phones as she strides around a corner, under slamming sunlight, toward the entrance of a high-rise motel. Others will burn to know what followed.

"Santa Monica, California" contains a characteristic pinprick of found humor: an E has fallen from a sign on the motel's exterior, so that it reads

The passage from familiarity to strangeness -- or back and forth between the two -- seems to fascinate Wessel. A picture titled "New Mexico" (1969) describes a one-story adobe-style house with a perfectly sensible front yard treatment for a climate hostile to lawns: a sparse scattering of rocks and struggling vegetation on barren ground. But viewers who know the comics of George Herriman (1880-1944) will wonder in what spirit the homeowner re-created the Southwest moonscape in which Herriman set the adventures of Krazy Kat.

Some Wessel pictures find psychological metaphor in factual circumstance. In "Nevada" (1975), a natty middle-aged man stands alongside a cottage as well kept as he appears. He stares at a dilapidated neighboring house, on which his shadow falls, just a few feet away. The camera view reveals a wide canyon opening just behind the gap between the buildings. Seemingly without effort, Wessel has formed an image of a man resisting seeing into his own future.

Banality and spookiness trade places frequently in Wessel's work, sometimes in the course of our inspecting a single image.

His Las Vegas series may appear to traffic in easy targets, but it also rewards close study. The big color print "No. 15, From Las Vegas Series" (2002) looks straightforward enough. It shows a schlock landscape painting hanging in the center of a mirrored wall adjoining the elevators at the end of a garish hotel corridor.

Other photographers -- Diane Arbus (1923-1971), Lee Friedlander -- have shown us the ironies of landscape imagery in windowless wastelands. And Wessel seems merely to do more of the same until it occurs to you to wonder why neither he nor his camera appears reflected in the mirrored wall.

He found just the right standpoint -- a landscapist's obsession -- so that the painting would conceal him. Meanwhile a security camera eyes the corridor from a bubble in the ceiling: the invisible cameraman under surveillance.

SECA award winners: Each installment of SFMOMA's biennial SECA awards to uncelebrated Bay Area artists makes the honor's value harder to estimate.

At this point in the series' history, the selection of an artist such as Kota Ezawa -- who already has a national, even international, exhibition record -- does more for SECA than it does for him.

Named for a museum auxiliary group, the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art, the SECA award confers a modest cash prize and a place in a group exhibition at the museum and its catalog.

Forget trying to discover a pattern in SECA's choices. The long jurying process, which involves multiple studio visits to nominated artists, seems to seek a certain level of intensity that might manifest itself in any number of ways.

Ezawa has made his name using computer animation to simplify images lifted from the common culture, such as the supposed home movie of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's wedding and honeymoon that circulated on the Internet. Ezawa has made it into a two-channel video, perhaps with reference to early stereopticon pictures of the Western landscape in which the lurid memento plays out.

Characteristic of his work with video, Ezawa has left the soundtrack intact, its tone and detail in this case causing us to seek relief in the inaccuracy of the images.

Leslie Shows stands out among the SECA award winners with paintings I find much easier to admire than to like. They grow out of moments implicit in every painter's process that most paintings ask us to leave out of account: the moments -- or hours, days -- of scrutiny that come between one decision or spell of execution and another.

"Two Ways to Organize" (2006) may have begun with slurries of acrylic wash in which Shows then saw landscape inklings that she then half exaggerated and half obliterated by the addition of collage and other media.

This sort of stop-and-start improvisation frequently goes off the rails but Shows has a surer instinct for it than Sarah Cain, another SECA winner of dreamy unpredictability.

Amy Franceschini gets credit for some ingenious found-object sculpture expressing a unique blend of humor and activism. But among the five, Mitzi Pederson stirs expectations most intriguingly. Her floor piece in broken cinder block and glitter "Untitled (ten years later or maybe just one)" (2005) cuts a most peculiar middle path between process and artifice, optimism and desolation.