NONFICTION - March 24, 1996

LANDSCAPES FOR THE HOMELESS by Anthony Hernandez (DG BANK-Forderpreis Fotografie/Sprengel Museum Hanover: $35; 87 pp.). It’s been said that the measure of a society can be taken by looking at the way it treats its weakest members. If that’s true, then this series of 50 color images of living sites created by Los Angeles’ homeless population suggests that America is in trouble. Further evidence can be found in the fact that Hernandez had to go to Europe to find someone willing to publish these pictures. “Everyone here said they were too depressing,” says the 47-year-old artist. Obviously, America just doesn’t want to know.

California’s homeless population mushroomed in the mid-’60s, when then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, in his infinite wisdom, closed the state mental institutions and turned the residents onto the streets. Hernandez, a Vietnam vet who was born and raised here, began taking pictures in the streets of L.A. in the early 1970s, so he was aware of these people early on and watched their numbers grow.

Working in a photographic tradition that stretches from Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine and the FSA photographers of the Depression to Robert Frank in the ‘50s, Hernandez began this particular project in 1988 and continued to work on it for three years. Describing the taking of the pictures as “like being on a reconnaissance mission,” he photographed transient sites only when the residents were away; the fact that we see these homes only when they’re uninhabited is sadly in keeping with the invisibility we often confer on these people when we encounter them on the street.

It’s a thorny business making beautiful images of terrible things, and one could take issue with how gorgeous these photographs are purely in terms of composition and color. Then again, had Hernandez not invested his subject with an element of formal classicism, he’d probably would have had a hard time getting the viewer to stay with his pictures, because even dressed in fine-art drag, the world Hernandez shows us is clearly a brutal one.

The sites tend to be shockingly primitive, perhaps because the people who create them realize there’s no point in trying to transform whatever patch of dirt they land on into a real home because the authorities will be around shortly to chase them farther down the road. (The city periodically razes all homeless encampments, ostensibly for sanitation reasons.) Consequently, most of the sites involve little more than bedding, clothing, plastic bags and empty food containers.

One encampment is nothing more than a cardboard pallet, a scattering of leaves and several pages torn from a pornographic magazine. It’s an image of bone-rattling loneliness, and in looking at it, you realize that the person who lives here was once somebody’s child. Then you ask yourself: What series of misfortunes brought this person to this point? And what bit of grace spared me from it?