Anthony Hernandez

Fundación MAPFRE is launching its 2019 season with the first exhibition to be held in Spain on the American photographer Anthony Hernandez (born Los Angeles, 1947), which will also be the first major retrospective devoted to him. Featuring more than 130 photographs, it will offer an extensive survey of Hernandez’s lengthy and prolific career while also celebrating his distinctive and unique style of street photography and its significant evolution over time.

The exhibition has been organised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), an institution with which Fundación MAPFRE has collaborated since 2015 when it presented the exhibition Garry Winogrand at its Madrid exhibition space. At the present time Fundacion MAPFRE’S exhibition Brassaï can be seen at the SFMOMA, where it is on display until February 17, 2019.

Anthony Hernandez
The son of Mexican immigrants, Anthony Hernandez was born and raised in Los Angeles. Initially unaware of the formal traditions of photography and essentially self-taught, he developed his own way of understanding street photography that was closely connected to the particular characteristics of his native city, its run-down urban landscapes and the increasing proliferation of asphalt and cement. During his career Hernandez has seamlessly passed from black and white to colour, from 35mm cameras to large-format ones, from the human form to landscape and the abstraction of details. The result is an unusually varied oeuvre in which the guiding thread is its breathtaking formal beauty and its subtle commitment to issues relating to society today.

Particularly notable among the images included in the exhibition are the black and white photographs taken on the streets of central Los Angeles with which Hernandez embarked on his career in the late 1960s and early 1970s; his first colour photographs, taken on Rodeo Drive in the mid-1980s; and a selection from his series Landscapes for the Homeless, created between 1988 and 1991 and particularly praised by specialist critics. For the latter series Hernandez photographed thrown-away objects from abandoned places where homeless people had lived, thus evoking the lives of those who had found refuge there at some point. Another fundamental section of the exhibition is devoted to the artist’s most abstract work; large-format, colour images either created recently by Hernandez in Los Angeles or during his trips to numerous destinations ranging from Oakland and Baltimore to Rome.

The exhibition
Covering Anthony Hernandez’s entire career of more than 45 years, the exhibition is structured as six thematic sections that also follow a chronological order, although with some exceptions that reveal how particular visual motifs recur in different series over time.

Curator: Erin O’Toole, Associate Curator of Photography, Baker Street Foundation,
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Production: SFMOMA in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE