Anthony Hernandez (photographer)

Anthony Hernandez
Born 1947 (age 68–69)
Los Angeles
Education Roosevelt High School; East Los Angeles College
Spouse(s) Judith Freeman
Website anthonyhernandezphotography.com

Military career

Service/branch United States Army
Years of service 1967-1969

Anthony Hernandez (born 1947) is an American photographer who divides his time between Los Angeles, his birthplace, and Idaho. His photography has included street photography, the built environment and other remains of civilization, particularly those discarded or abandoned elements that serve as evidence of human presence.[1][2][3][4][5] He has spent most of his career photographing in Los Angeles and its environs.[6] His wife is the novelist Judith Freeman.[4]

Early life and career formation

Hernandez was born to Mexican immigrants in Aliso Village, a housing project in East Los Angeles, and moved to Boyle Heights at about the age of four.[6][7][8][9][10] He traces his introduction to photography to a textbook a friend gave him when he was a senior at Roosevelt High School.[4] He took basic photography courses while attending East Los Angeles College from 1966-1967, though he is largely self-taught.[3][4][6]

Hernandez began to devote his time to photography around 1970 after serving in the United States Army from 1967-1969 (he served as a medic in the Vietnam War in 1968).[11][12][13] His earliest images are of parts and machinery left in an empty lot near an automobile repair shop close to his home, foreshadowing the development of common subjects of his work: urban decay and abandoned detritus.[3][4] In 1970 Hernandez presented a portfolio of images to John Szarkowski, curator of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, who purchased two photographs for the museum and also introduced him to the photographers Dianne Arbus and Gary Winogrand.[10]

Early street work

His work from the 1970s is defined by 35 mm black-and-white street photography (mainly portraiture) in Los Angeles and Hollywood that established a distinctive style characterized by subjects who appear alienated and "overwhelmed by unseen forces."[9][14][15] One critic remarked that these compositions show a "peculiar state of stasis."[16] Writing about his 1976 pictures of Washington, D.C., a critic observed that the photographs present an "original photographic approach" that captures an unusual state of animation—even "disequilibrium"—with his subjects simultaneously "energized and abstracted."[17] His early work shows the influence of Garry Winogrand.[18] In the late 1970s Hernandez began to use a Deardorff 5x7 view camera, which changed the character of his work.[16][19] Between 1978 and 1983 he continued to make images of prosaic elements of Los Angeles street life and public spaces, but the wider orientation of the view camera resulted in people taking a less prominent place in his pictures.[18] These pictures represent a fusion of street and landscape photographic traditions and offer energized and animated compositions unusual for view camera work.[16][18][19] Many of the images suggest darker social realities.[4][16] A series from this period, "Public Transit Areas," focuses on city bus stops, and was complemented by related bodies of work, including "Public Use Areas," "Public Fishing Areas," and "Automotive Landscapes."[18] Some of these pictures have been likened to the aesthetic of the New Topographics.[19] In 1984–1985 he shifted to color work with a series of 35 mm close-up street portraits of shoppers taken on Rodeo Drive.[3][20] He used the same zone focus technique he had used in his earliest street work whereby the camera is pre-focused for a set distance, allowing for quick capture.[21] Even so, they adopt some of the same deliberateness and formalness of his view camera work.[19] Hernandez commented that these portraits are more intimate than his earlier street portraits.[22] The images explore a complex mélange of consumerism, class, self-presentation, fantasy, sexuality, and photographic representation, and Hernandez artist regards them as his first successful color photographs.[19][21] Hernandez stopped photographing people after this project, and he also began to photograph exclusively in color.[4][10]

Artistic shift and later work

In 1986, as artist-in-residence at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, Hernandez photographed an array of spent shells and exploded debris left over at a target range—absent of the shooters. He continued this project after the residency and added shooting ranges located in the Angeles National Forest.[4] This body of work signaled a shift in his artistic vision toward capturing scenes suggesting abandonment and desolation absent of human players yet charged with intrigue about their involvement.[23] They also reveal another signature tactic of his compositions, which is to offer visual allure that draws a viewer into troubling subject matter.[23]

His "Landscapes for the Homeless" series, which he produced from 1988–1991, captured images of homelessness sites located near and under Los Angeles freeways, focusing exclusively on the inhabitants' makeshift shelters and discarded refuse nearby.[13][23] This suite of photographs was unique in their focus on the evidence of homelessness and became very popular in Europe after first being exhibited in the United States in 1993.[4] A critic described the images as both "forensic and poetic."[10]

"Pictures for Rome," a series Hernandez made from 1998–1999 under the auspices of the Rome Prize, eschews views of classic structures in favor of details of abandoned buildings and incomplete office structures located on the periphery of the city.[4][23] He used the same square format he had used for his "Landscapes of the Homeless" pictures, and they were his first images taken indoors.[4]

His "Pictures for Oakland" (2001) and "Pictures for L.A." (2000–2002) document various states of construction and disintegration of buildings, the latter including the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Belmont Learning Center, and Aliso Village.[1][9]

A body of work associated with the Los Angeles River created from January 2003–May 2004, "Everything," explores the river and environs—areas near Hernandez's boyhood home—in a series of color still lifes of flotsam and jetsam situated in or near the river.[8] These images function concurrently as color and form studies, and as commentary on societal relationships with the discarded objects.[7]

Discarded Exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art

In "Discarded," 2012–2015, Hernandez comments on the aftermath of the subprime mortgage crisis in his austere color photographs of abandoned houses and other remains located in residential subdivisions in the desert east of Los Angeles. This series marks the return of people to his images, including at least one portrait.[24][25]

Hernandez continues to use film cameras, though his prints are digitally produced.[25]

Publications by Hernandez

Selected solo exhibitions

Selected awards

Collections

Hernandez's work is held in the following public collections:

References

  1. 1 2 "Los Angeles Times". Around the Galleries: Remembering Human Presence. January 31, 2003.
  2. ↑ "Anthony Hernandez - About the Artist". Galerie Thomas Zander. Retrieved 21 April 2016.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "Anthony Hernandez". Guggenheim Museum. Retrieved 20 April 2016.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Muchnic, Suzanne (2000-10-08). "A Unique Eye for the Ordinary". Los Angeles Times. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved 2016-04-26.
  5. ↑ Zellen, Jody (January 2003). "Anthony Hernandez". ArtScene. 22 (5).
  6. 1 2 3 Hernandez, Hernandez (2002). "Sekula, Allan. Waiting for Los Angeles". Waiting for Los Angeles. Tucson, Arizona: Nazraeli Press. ISBN 1590050428.
  7. 1 2 Hernandez, Anthony (2005). "Lord, M.G. Memento Mori". Everything. Tucson, Arizona: Nazraeli Press/JGS.
  8. 1 2 Freeman, Judith (October 17, 2004). "Río Surreal". The Los Angeles Times Magazine: 16–21.
  9. 1 2 3 Zellen, Jody (January 2003). "Anthony Hernandez". ArtScene. 22 (5).
  10. 1 2 3 4 Lubow, Arthur (2016-10-14). "Photographs of Desperate Shadows Cast by the California Sun". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2016-12-04.
  11. ↑ "Anthony Hernandez". Getty Museum. Retrieved 19 April 2016.
  12. ↑ Nevada: Lewis Baltz, Anthony Hernandez. University of Nevada. 1987. pp. 20–21.
  13. 1 2 Hernandez, Anthony (1995). Landscapes for the Homeless. Hannover: Sprengel Museum.
  14. ↑ Miles, Christopher (October 2003). "Exhibitionism: Anthony Hernandez: Everything; Trajectories: the Photographic Work of Robbert Flick". Flaunt (58): 192–193.
  15. ↑ Holte, Michael Ned (2006). "Anthony Hernandez: Christopher Grames Gallery". Artforum.
  16. 1 2 3 4 Hernandez, Anthony (2007). "Badger, Gerry. Invisible City: Picturing Los Angeles". Waiting, Sitting, Fishing, and Some Automobiles: LA. Bethesda, Maryland: Loosestrife Editions. ISBN 9780975312025.
  17. ↑ "Livingston, Jane. "[Introduction to the exhibition]"". The Nation's Capital in Photographs, 1976. Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art. 1976.
  18. 1 2 3 4 5 Bartels, Kathleen (2009). "Wall, Jeff. Introduction.". Anthony Hernandez. Vancouver, BC: Vancouver Art Gallery. ISBN 9781895442731.
  19. 1 2 3 4 5 Hernandez, Anthony (2012). "Rugoff, Ralph. Rodeo Drive, 1984". Rodeo Drive, 1984. London: Mack (publishing). ISBN 9781907946264.
  20. ↑ Hernandez, Anthony (1985). "Rodeo Drive". Aperture. 101 (Winter): 16–23.
  21. 1 2 Hagen, Charles (October 1985). "Anthony Hernandez: Burden Gallery". Artforum. 34 (2): 124.
  22. ↑ Christie, Tom (2006-03-01). "The Gold Coast: Beverly Hills, 1984". L.A. Weekly. Retrieved 2016-05-01.
  23. 1 2 3 4 Rugoff, Ralph (January 2000). "Familiar Haunts: the Photography of Anthony Hernandez". Artforum. 38 (5): 98–101.
  24. ↑ Hernandez, Anthony (2016). "Rohrbach, John. Introduction". Discarded. Fort Worth, Texas: Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Association with Nazraeli Press.
  25. 1 2 "Anthony Hernandez Photos Subject of New Amon Carter Exhibition". Star-Telegram. Retrieved 2016-04-25.
  26. ↑ "Anthony Hernandez" WorldCat. Accessed 27 October 2016
  27. 1 2 3 4 5 Pictures for Rome. Santa Monica, CA: Smart Art Press. 2000. ISBN 1889195456.
  28. ↑ http://artsblock.ucr.edu/Exhibition/Anthony-Hernandez
  29. ↑ http://www.thesheldon.org/page.php?page_id=41
  30. ↑ https://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/the_exhibitions/exhibit_anthony_hernandez.html
  31. ↑ http://www.cartermuseum.org/exhibitions/discarded-photographs-by-anthony-hernandez
  32. ↑ https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/anthony-hernandez/
  33. ↑ http://www.lightwork.org/air/
  34. ↑ http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/search/?view=grid&query=YToxOntzOjU6InF1ZXJ5IjtzOjE3OiJhbnRob255IGhlcm5hbmRleiI7fQ%3D%3D&options=YToxOntzOjk6ImJlaGF2aW91ciI7czo2OiJ2aXN1YWwiO30%3D
  35. ↑ http://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/anthony-hernandez
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