While he has photographs other cities, his home studio is in his native Los Angeles. Hie visual poetry is an every day life of working class, unsettled objects, landscape images.
Anthony Hernandez is the first retrospective to honor the more than 45-year career of this major American photographer. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is featuring approximately 160 photographs — many never shown before — the exhibition includes a remarkably varied body of work united by its formal beauty and its subtle consideration of contemporary social issues.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Anthony Hernandez developed his own individual style of street photography, one attuned to the desolate allure and sprawling expanses of his hometown. Over the course of his career, he has deftly moved from black-and-white to color photography, from 35mm to large-format cameras, and from the human figure to the landscape to abstracted detail.
Although Hernandez has turned his lens on other cities — including Rome, Italy, and various American locales — Los Angeles, and especially the regions inhabited by the working class, the poor, and the homeless, has been his most enduring subject.
Public Transit Areas #46 1979, printed 2016
Pictures for Rome #17 1999, printed 2016
Selections from the series Everything 2002, printed 2014
Discarded #50 2014
by Anzor Makharadze
This exhibition presents the full scope of Hernandez's long and prolific career