Quoted By:
Stephen Hilger The title of curator Erin O’Toole’s catalog essay for the retrospective is “A Very Hard Look,” which is actually from your quote about how you’ve approached the people and landscape of Los Angeles.
Anthony Hernandez Well, I was thinking about cities in general, with all their hard surfaces, and also as difficult places to walk through. She came up with that title because I mentioned it, but it’s also that I wanted my pictures to be more focused—by which I mean that I only photographed in dense places, in downtown LA, in Hollywood. I wasn’t the kind of photographer that took his camera everywhere. I was only working in a certain place, in a very concentrated space. I thought my pictures would look at the movement of all these people, but in the end they were something else and hard to look at. They don’t show you any kind of quirky thing or catch activities you might say are comic. I was very conscious of observing the private moments of people in these very difficult spaces. I started seeing other street photographs, whether it’s Robert Frank or Garry Winogrand, and I realized my pictures would be different because I was approaching it in this more focused way. There was a certain picture I wanted to make, and that’s what I did.
