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Anthony Hernandez
Anthony Hernandez
HC, 23,5 x 28,5 cm., 64 pp.
Vancouver 2009
EURO 38.00
A new book of old and rare gems by the Los Angeles native Anthony Hernandez. Although Mr. Hernandez has until now published several books of his own photography, this book is the first to mark a major exhibition of his work in a museum. This show, put on by the Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada, was curated by Jeff Wall. Appropriately, it is also Mr. Wall's introduction that presents and praises the retrospective collection to a viewer of the book. In this introduction he identifies Mr. Hernandez's photographs as invaluable contributions to contemporary American photography in general, and specifically both to the "New Topography" (think Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams) and street photography (think Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand) schools. Mr. Wall takes care to show how Mr. Hernandez's work adds depth to both groups yet resists falling exclusively into either category.
The Anthony Hernandez retrospective encompasses photographs taken between 1970 and 1984, all in the Los Angeles region. These photos are presented in six groups. The first of these, "Early Street Photography," fits the most comfortably of all of them into the classic 'street photography ' genre. These photos were snapped in black and white by a 35 mm camera. Like many Garry Winogrand photos, all are aptly and quickly stolen glimpses of fleeting human moments. The next four of the groups, ("Public Transit Areas," "Public Use Areas," "Public Fishing Areas," and "Automative Landscapes") are in black and white but shot with a tripod. As a result, they feel less like eternally paused action and more like meditative studies, exhibiting the working class people of L.A. and their specific -if temporary- environments with equal priority. Hernandez documents monotony ( for example, of waiting at a bus stop) instead of action, and we can feel that he has engaged in his own patient process to do so. Finally, in a Wizard of Oz, 'we're not in Kansas anymore' change from black and white to color, "Rodeo Drive" shows us the famous side of L.A.. While these photos exhibit an ever-relevant depiction, they have the glorious novelty feel of 80's color. Mr. Hernandez illustrates, in the familiarity and fluency of a native, the gaping disparities between the glamour and grit of L.A. In the last paragraph of his introduction, Jeff Wall writes about the "Rodeo Drive" series: "They are a diffident, reticent group of pictures and hint that the photographer's vital interests are already elsewhere. And, indeed, Hernandez has become quite a different sort of photographer over the past twenty-four years. But, taken together with the other series, they are part of a body of work that is one of the most complex and substantial examples of the transformation of the relations between art photography and the process of reportage." Having gone on to photograph the makeshift abodes of L.A.'s homeless, Hernandez's "Rodeo Drive" photos are taken with a suspicious but tolerant, even entertained, eye.
In this catalogue in general, Anthony Hernandez shows us a timelessly valuable portrait of an American city with the heart and expertise of an insider and the trained eye of a photographer aware of the whole spectrum.
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