Jerry Hsu’s How About Never brings together photographs made in Los Angeles since 2011. Published by MACK in 2026, the 176-page hardcover treats the city less as a backdrop than as a presence with something like a mind of its own. Hsu tracks its contradictions without resolving them: hope and despair, beauty and pain, the ordinary and the ominous held in the same frame or set loose across an atmospheric sequence.

The images are specific and unsettled. Disfigured fences and physical injuries appear alongside a discarded toilet, a blood-stained mattress, crashed cars, and a bank burning with an ominous glow. Portraits seek intimacy with their subjects amid the disrepair and cruelty of the urban environment. What might read as a catalogue of damage instead accumulates into something stranger: an uncanny, dissonant arrangement that edges toward harmony.

That tension is the book’s real subject. How About Never does not simply document Los Angeles; it proposes destruction as a possible source of change and rebirth. The sequence matters because it refuses to separate tenderness from wreckage. Hsu’s portraits and his street details share a mood, and the accumulation of images gives the work a structure that is felt rather than announced.

For collectors, the appeal lies in that sustained attention. This is not a loose gathering of city pictures but a body of work shaped over years, with a coherent emotional and visual argument. The 176-page hardcover format gives the sequence room to breathe. Hsu’s Los Angeles is damaged, intimate, and unresolved—qualities that reward slow looking and make the book a serious addition to a collection attentive to sequencing and atmosphere.