Everything #2 (2003/04)

Anthony Hernandez has tunnel vision. In several recent series, he has been attracted to tunnels, colonnades or hallways as subject matter. He’s like a man peering into the wrong end of the telescope, trying to see who’s looking back from the opposite perspective. By photographing such spaces, maybe he can understand the point of view of people who build or inhabit them.

Sometimes the homeless actually were living in an L.A. River drainage tunnel such as this one. In summer, they could wedge a board against the curved walls and sleep on it without fear that a torrent might drown them in the night. Since Hernandez had also done a series on the homeless some years earlier, there was a certain confluence of interests here. He calls homelessness a “failure to face the future,” and the same might be said of L.A.’s water use.

As he walked the river’s concrete course for miles, watching the tunnels grow from 8 or 10 feet in diameter upstream to 20 feet downstream, he was also walking into his own past; Hernandez was born here and grew up playing in the river. Like an elevated freeway, this depressed riverbed carries the city’s history with it. Hernandez’s focus is narrow in this regard, too. For him, the light at the end of the tunnel is always one that illuminates his city in a new way.