Forever

Forever follows the daily movements of homeless residents through downtown Los Angeles and the neighborhoods of Compton, Watts and South Central, photographed from the vantage point of the street rather than as a record of what people leave behind.

Made between 2007 and 2012, the 128-page hardback gathers Anthony Hernandez's color photographs of underpasses, chain-link fences, tarps and makeshift shelters, framed so the camera occupies the same low, exposed position as its unseen subjects. The title and approach return to ground Hernandez covered two decades earlier in Landscapes for the Homeless (1996), a project begun after a conversation with photographer Lewis Baltz; here he notes that the population he first photographed has only grown.

Hernandez (born 1947, Los Angeles) has spent his career photographing the city's overlooked infrastructure and the people who inhabit its margins, work held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Getty. Forever, published by MACK in 2017, extends a body of work concerned less with individual portraits than with the built environment homelessness produces.