Anthony Hernandez (b. 1947) tends to be associated with American street photography; however, the SFMoMA retrospective reveals a body of work that transcends facile classifications and genres. We enter the exhibition imagining we know what we are going to see, and we leave having shed many of our assumptions: which is a good sign.
Anthony Hernandez is an autodidact who keeps outdoing himself: he learned about photography, its techniques, history, and its major figures by taking photographs. There is something fresh about his early series from the 1970s–1980s, even though they are clearly reminiscent of the tradition of street photography. The series Landscapes for the Homeless, dating 1988 to 1991, is well known and, when compared to Hernandez’s earlier photographs, seems to be breaking new ground. Anthony Hernandez is no longer just a photographer of Los Angeles, its beaches and city life; he has become an explorer of urban otherness. He explains his approach by saying that he wants to “face the city,” and he shows Los Angeles in a new and unprecedented way. His photography is liminal; it wanders along the margins and explores the city beyond beauty and ugliness. He is guided only by his obsession for traces of human activity in an urban environment, and his sole methodology is his intuition about light and color.
The exhibition offers a cross-section of Anthony Hernandez’s work, from his early photographs of Los Angeles streets to his most recent series, and shows the full range of his practice, from black-and-white to color and from 35mm to large format photography. What is immediately striking is the sheer diversity of his artistic output, in terms of techniques and subject matter; no less impressive is the photographer’s ability to redefine himself. Despite its diversity, as vast as the city he photographs, his work is also undeniably coherent. It is this subtle dialectic which is responsible for the beauty of the SFMoMA exhibition. Whether we call this a “style” or a “worldview” is of little importance: Anthony Hernandez is a singular artist.
Hugo Fortin
Hugo Fortin is a photography critic based in New York.
Anthony Hernandez
From September 24, 2016 until January 1, 2017
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Avenue
San Francisco, CA
USA
