Anthony Hernandez’s Discarded takes its title from the habit of abandoning what no longer seems useful, and applies it to unfinished houses and the land they occupy east and northeast of Los Angeles. The project grew out of the 2008 recession, which fell hard on California, leaving homebuilders and owners with loans and mortgages worth more than their properties. The thirty-five photographs were made in desert and high desert cities including Riverside, Salton City, Lancaster and Palmdale.
The book opens with an essay by John Rohrbach, Senior Curator of Photography at the Amon Carter Museum, where the work was first exhibited in 2016. Rohrbach sets Hernandez against the New Topographics generation—Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz among them—who through the 1970s and 1980s trained attention on suburbia’s spread across the open West. Hernandez, he argues, asks viewers to reckon with failure rather than growth: bust following boom, ventures abandoned to banks and to time. Rohrbach also notes a difference in emphasis. Where photographs of hard country often romance isolation and self-sufficiency, these keep the necessity of community in view.
Hernandez is not a newcomer to such terrain. His work has been shown at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Sprengel Museum in Hannover and the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris, and in 2016 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art mounted a major retrospective. Discarded belongs to that sustained engagement with the built environment and its failures, and Rohrbach’s framing gives the sequence a historical argument rather than a merely topical one.
Nazraeli Press published the book as a slipcased hardcover of 68 pages, with 35 four-color plates, in a limited edition of 350 numbered copies signed by the photographer. For collectors, that combination—a coherent project, a curator’s essay, and a physical edition that presents the photographs as a sequence—makes the book a considered addition to holdings in contemporary landscape photography.
