Rio Surreal

For two years now, my husband, artist-photographer Anthony Hernandez, has been making pictures along the Los Angeles River. He leaves our apartment in the cool hours of the morning, setting off with our border collie, Scout. They drive to some point--anywhere along a stretch from Glendale to the port of Long Beach--then walk for miles, stopping only to shoot whenever something catches Anthony’s eye.

What attracts him are not the familiar long views or surrounding landscape, the bridges or even the river itself. What interests him is everything that has been swept into the channel and left behind, all the detritus of this city of millions.

“They’re like still lifes,” he said one evening as we looked over some images. “Details of a landscape.”

And so they are. Not Cezanne’s apples and pears, but a jar of mayonnaise, with marks of knife scrapings on the inside. Or tumescent olives trapped in a bottle and sweating in the brutal sun, the drops of condensation like beads of glass.

These are tough pictures. Beautiful pictures. A dead bird floating in a sheen of blue oil. A rubber ball resembling a small planet on a bed of green algae. Never before have his subjects seemed more intimately rendered.

Perhaps because, with this work, Anthony has come full circle. He was born two blocks from the river, in Boyle Heights’ Aliso Village, and as a child the river channel was his playground, locus of his imagination. Not a place to swim, but a fantastic setting for more edgy exploration. “This Boy’s Life,” urban style.

At some point, Anthony decided this collection of images would be called “Everything.” It sounded right, acknowledging how this is the place where everything finally comes to rest.

He shot the tunnels that funnel the city’s storm drains into the river. Big, creepy places, dank with sludge and slimy water, glowing with graffiti, spaces that in his photographs take on a kind of hallowed beauty, like the arches of cathedrals, or hallucinatory black holes. Sometimes the spaces were so dark that they required long exposures, during which Anthony would come out and bask in the sun with Scout.

When Anthony announced in May that he was almost finished with the series, I decided to go to the river with him, to see where he had been.

Near the City of Industry, we walked through pools of stagnant water and fields of garbage--a glimpse of a shadowy homeless person here, walls of shimmering graffiti there. Everywhere the hard, unyielding concrete, split by a narrow ribbon of water. As rivers go, I thought, this has to be one of the sorriest in the world. And also one of the most poignant.

What I wanted to ask was: How did you do it? How did you endure the terrible smell? The sight of the bloated rat? Or the dead cat? How did you enter the gaping mouth of that stinking tunnel, the one with the tongue of fetid slime?

But, of course, I knew the answer: He did it to make a picture.

I saw there was another side to the river, too--the natural world of plants and animals, all the more amazing that it persists at all. Birds sang as we walked along, and dozens of black-necked stilts strutted about on long pink legs, herding their tiny babies before them. Ducks nested on humps of trash and weeds. A heron lifted off as the smell of hot dogs drifted down from the Farmer John’s factory. On the periphery of the channel, trains moved slowly along the tracks. Trucks rumbled across bridges. What a sordid, lovely, vibrant world.

At the end of the day Anthony made his last picture and then he took a cup and gathered water from the river to sprinkle on a small plant he’d been tending for months.

“There,” he said. “It’s over.”

Turning toward the downtown skyline, outlined in a silvery vaporous glow, we headed home.

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“Everything,” Anthony Hernandez’s collection of L.A. River photographs, will be at the Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica; (310) 587-3373, starting Oct. 23. An accompanying book by the same title will be published later this fall by Nazraeli Press.