b. 1947, Los Angeles, Calif.

Anthony Hernandez was born in 1947 in Aliso Village, an East Los Angeles public housing project. While Hernandez was a senior at Roosevelt High School, a friend gave him a photography textbook that had been left in a bathroom. After taking a few basic courses in photography at East Los Angeles College from 1966 to 1967, Hernandez began to photograph around his neighborhood. His first photographs, taken with his family’s box camera, were of automobile parts littered about an empty lot, presaging his future interest in urban detritus and decay. From 1967 to 1969, he served in the United States Army, spending 1968 in Vietnam. Upon his return, he developed a photographic language based on street portraiture. A series of photographs of people waiting for the bus, from the early 1980s, caught the attention of a magazine art director, who hired Hernandez for commercial work. He began experimenting with color to develop his commercial skills, but he soon left the job and applied his findings instead to more creative endeavors, namely a series of photographs of Rodeo Drive made in 1985.

While an artist-in-residence at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas in 1986, Hernandez discovered areas on the margins of the city where people would go for target practice; he made a series of photographs of these locations and similar ones in the Angeles National Forest. Landscapes for the Homeless (1988–2007), a series documenting the details of the living conditions of homeless people in Los Angeles, followed. Its first manifestation, created from 1988–91 and shown at the Turner/Krull Gallery in Los Angeles in 1993, attracted the most acclaim in 1995, when the Sprengel Museum Hannover published a book of the photographs and sponsored additional work. Hernandez’s subsequent projects include Pictures for Rome (1998–99) and Pictures for L.A. (2000–02), which focus on urban deconstruction and redevelopment in these two cities (the earlier series made while Hernandez was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome). In Los Angeles, he photographed Aliso Village just prior to its demolition, as well as the site destined for the Frank O. Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall. In 2007, at the invitation of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hernandez documented the construction of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum; rather than chronicle the progress of the building with more narrative photographs, the artist produced surprisingly minimal compositions of isolated I-beams.

Hernandez has had numerous solo exhibitions, including The Nation’s Capital in Photographs at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (1976) and shows at the California Museum of Photography at the University of California at Riverside (1982), Opsis Foundation in New York (1990), Centre National de la Photographie in Paris (1997), Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, California (2001), and Seattle Art Museum (2002). He has also participated widely in group exhibitions, including Eight Young Photographers at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris (1974), Exposed and Developed: American Photography in the 1970s at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. (1984), Foto Biénnale Rotterdam (1993), Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1996), California Invitational at the Ansel Adams Center for Photography in San Francisco (2001), and Visions from America: Photographs from the Whitney Museum of Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2002). He has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1975, 1978, and 1980), the Charles Pratt Memorial Award (1993), the DG Bank Förderpreis Fotografie from the Sprengel Museum Hannover (1995), the Higashikawa Prize (1998), and a COLA fellowship from the City of Los Angeles (1999). He divides his time between Los Angeles and Challis, Idaho.