Waiting in Los Angeles – At The Bus Stop 1979-1980

“…as his head turned, he saw the girl. She was just stepping off the bus … while he was thinking of her, the bus had bumbled away and she was crossing the slant intersection coming directly towards him. Not o him; she didn’t know he was there.”

– In a lonely place by Dorothy B. Hughes

 

 

If you were waiting for a bus in Los Angeles in the mid to late 1970s, there’s a chance that Anthony Hernandez (born 1947) took your picture. To capture the scene, the LA native used a large camera on a tripod to achieve sharp focus and emphasise the details of the urban environment surrounding the individuals.

As with John Brian King’s of people waiting at LAX in the 1980s, the waiting is not passive. Nothing seems still. Those lines and angles around the subjects take us away from them into the scene. We look up the road and around. We see people from behind. There are all kinds of moods and emotions here –  expectation, apprehension, anxiety, isolation, vulnerability.

 

 

So why LA?

“Because it’s where I grew up and where I knew so well, it was the first place I really thought about making pictures. And that’s how it began. I didn’t have any prior knowledge of this great tradition or history of street photography — people like Robert Frank or Cartier-Bresson, Paul Strand, anybody. It was nothing to do with that, just with my own experience in the city. It was very pure…

“Looking straight on when you’re walking down the street with your camera in your hand, it lends itself to a very fluid way of working — you’re photographing as you’re moving through this crowd of people, you’re capturing these quiet, intimate moments.”

– Anthony Hernandez to I-D mag

 

 

“When I was a kid, the only thing I actually remember doing was walking, looking, exploring my neighbourhood”

– Anthony Hernandez

 

 

 

Via: Yancey Richardson Gallery, SF Moma, Anthony Hernandez by Robert Adams and Erin O’Toole.