Sons of Adam: Landscape for the homeless II

Anthony Hernandez
Sons of Adam: Landscape for the homeless II

Photographs: Anthony Hernandez

Text: Regis Durand & Christophe Blaser

Publisher: Musée de l'Elysée, Centre national de la photographie

71 pages

Year: 1997

ISBN: 2867541085

Price: 35 €

Comments: Hardcover under dust jacket, 24 x 24,8 cm, color photographs. In very good condition. Text in English and French.

'Sons of Adam. Landscapes for the Homeless II' by Anthony Hernandez accompanied two exhibitions in 1997. It is a collection of color photographs showing where and how homeless people live.

For over 35 years, Hernandez has been internationally respected as being one of Los Angeles' most influential and defining figures in photography working in a tradition begun by Jacob Riis and photographers of the Depression. After returning from Vietnam, Hernandez began as a street photographer in the 1960s, using a 35mm camera to photograph figures in black and white in urban spaces. By the mid-Eighties, he abandoned figurative photographs in favor of a new body of work entitled Landscapes for the Homeless. He moved to large-scale photographs of recently unpopulated spaces to include the encampments and makeshift dwellings of Los Angeles' homeless citizens. He explains that,

"Nobody else was looking. And that's why people will see what I've seen ... that's what I forced them to do with these pictures. And that's why I first started this work [I thought] it would take people longer to see them, to get them ... they weren't pictures of the homeless themselves ... The hardest pictures I've ever made were the homeless pictures. I wasn't in a war zone but it was as if I were."