[5] He later studied parliamentary politics in Wellington, New Zealand as a Richter Scholar before returning to Chicago, where he worked variously as an artist, writer and photojournalist.

Kennedy lost, and in November Ronald Reagan won the general election against incumbent Jimmy Carter, discouraging Wassmann further from his State Department aspirations.

For a short time he shared a weekly page of street fashion in Women's Wear Daily with the New York photographer Bill Cunningham.

Cunningham took offense to the way WWD editors often portrayed the women he photographed, however, so he moved permanently to the New York Times and began his popular column.

[9] In the closing years of the decade Wassmann dedicated himself to street photography, shooting over 10,000 unpublished Kodachrome slides[citation needed] in a body of work the artist titles Chicago in the Reagan Era.

Wassmann first encountered the boxed assemblage and collage works of Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) at the Art Institute of Chicago in the mid-1970s, not long after the artist's death in 1972.

"[10] The large Bergman collection of Cornell boxes must have been just as bewildering to the museum's curators, as it was then oddly housed alone in a small room on the ground floor between Greek antiquities and Mayan artifacts.

"[16] Wassmann grew up influenced not only by his deep family roots, but more immediately by a Pennsylvania Dutch community in nearby Butler County, which only heightened his aesthetic for the spartan design and precise, but elegant, carpentry he saw in his Amish neighbors.

He would go on to spend several years studying with the German cabinetmaker Ernst Zacher and would not undertake his first boxed work until he had reached the maturity of his early forties.

[19] The young artist had been drawn to the church by a coworker in hopes of finding a cure for his brother, Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy, but he became equally fascinated by the transcendental nature of Mary Baker Eddy's teachings.

[24] Through the character of Johann Dieter Wassmann, the artist explores his transcendental vision of the lost opportunity of inseparable time and space as he imagines it might have been optimistically perceived in the hours before the dawn of the catastrophic twentieth century.

Here Wassmann draws heavily on the work of the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909) and his oft-quoted passage: The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength.

[27] In an unusual move for a contemporary artist, Wassmann does not sell his work; some pieces are given away as gifts, while most have been retained as part of a broader private collection of 18th and 19th century antiques and ephemera that are only infrequently exhibited as the estate of the character (see #Gallery section below).

In 2004, Art in America's Washington, D.C. correspondent, James Mahoney, wrote, Such visionaries as Herr Wassmann will not only endure, they will prevail, I'm more than certain.Wassmann continues to publish as a writer and photojournalist.

[32] In this role, he has co-produced two works by the playwright Brian Lipson: Bergasse 19, for the Melbourne International Arts Festival 2005 and A Large Attendance In The Antechamber, which saw a three-week run at the Sydney Opera House in July 2006.

In recent years he has collaborated with jazz pianist and Adelaide Festival director Paul Grabowsky[33] in the making of several albums, including Tales of Time and Space (Warner/Chappell), recorded in New York with Branford Marsalis and Joe Lovano; the ARIA Music Awards-winning Before Time Could Change Us [34] (Warner/Chappell) with Katie Noonan, libretto by Dorothy Porter and Ruby (AAO), with Ruby Hunter and Archie Roach.