Anthony Hernandez, photographer

The work of photographer Anthony Hernandez (born 1947) is at once highly personal and deeply resonant. His retrospective at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid spans his more than 45-year career, revealing an unusually varied body of of photographs united by their arresting formal beauty and subtle engagement with contemporary social issues. The Mapfre galleries chart his continual reconceptualization of his approach, tracing his deft movement from black and white to color, 35 mm to large-format cameras, ans from the human figure to landscapes to abstracted detail.

Hernandez began making pictures on the streets of his native Los Angeles in the late 1960s. Essentially self-taught, he had taken dark room classes at East Los Angeles College, but was largely unaware of the history of the medium and its formal traditions. Rather than perpetuating Hollywood's idealized image of the city, he chose instead to photograph the LA inhabited by the working class, the poor and the homeless, developing a unique style of photography attuned to the desolate beauty and sprawling expanses of his hometown. From the start, he has found visual poetry in what could be dismissed as inner city blight and has seen aesthetic potential in the abandoned and discarded. While Hernandez has also photographed in other locations in the US and Europe, Los Angeles has remained his primary subject.

Despite the many shifts in his practice over the years, Hernandez still considers himself a street photographer. Endlessly curious, he relishes the process of discovery and sees his medium as a means of understanding the world around him. He remains true to his conviction that great photography is the result of more than just a keen eye. As Hernandez once noted, "Being aware is more important than the evidence of the awareness on a piece of paper. Being sensitive to what passes in front of you is more important than what passes into the camera." Erin O'Toole, Curator

Anthony Hernandez is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE, Bárbara de Braganza 12, 28004 Madrid. 
From January 31 to May 12, 2019.