Waiting, Sitting, Fishing and Some Automobiles – Anthony Hernandez

A beautiful and rare book designed by John Gossage, with an essay by Gerry Badger.

Hernandez began to devote his time to photography after serving in the United States Army from 1967-1969 (he served as a medic in the Vietnam War in 1968)
In the summer of 1969, he took a workshop with Lee Friedlander, and in 1970 he built his own darkroom in an apartment he rented in the Westlake area of Los Angeles. In the same year, Hernandez’s work was included in his first museum exhibition and publication, California Photographers, 1970.
In 1970 Hernandez presented a portfolio of images to John Szarkowski, curator of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, who purchased two photographs for the museum and also introduced him to the photographers Dianne Arbus, Duane Michals, and Garry Winogrand.
In  the late 1970s Hernandez began to use a Deardorff 5×7 view camera, which changed the character of his work.
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Between 1978 and 1983 he continued to make images of prosaic elements of Los Angeles street life and public spaces, but the wider orientation of the view camera resulted in people taking a less prominent place in his pictures while augmenting the presence of the built environment. These pictures represent a fusion of street and landscape photographic traditions and offer energized and animated compositions unusual for view camera work.

The photographs in this book are drawn from four bodies of work made between 1979 and 1983. Broadly speaking, it shows as Lewis Baltz said, people waiting and taking ‘very, very humble recreations.’ The four image groups making up the book are people waiting at bus stops, people lunching or sitting in public spaces, people at public fishing areas, and automobile repair shops.