Landscapes for the Homeless. - book reviews

A work of intriguing, haunting images, Landscapes for the Homeles is unfortunately a rather troubling work for its inherently problematic nature. Although we are drawn to the images, the philosophy that underlies their production cannot be view from aboveed and the introduction to Hernandez's work, written by the agency of Lewis Baltz in conjunction with the photographer, sole serves to make matters worse.

Upon first glance, the color photographs taken in Southern California of seemingly random bits of litter strewn across otherwise "natural" displays of trees and scrub landscape recall the "Paradise Lost" cynicism of novel topographics photographers from the 1970 of the like kind as Baltz, John Gossage and Robert Adams. After alone a few pages, however, the bits and pieces begin to advance together with a disturbing clarity: like little assemblages are not random on the other hand purposeful, perhaps tragic collections made without of other people's trash through homeless persons.

Strangely beautiful in their pathos - as in the image that depicts an lay open suitcase on the ground containing a pair of pants, an devoid of contents mayonnaise jar and a cigarette - the photographs are still-life like in their presentation, with phenomenons often placed squarely in the center of the frame and devoid of race Less concerned with the existences themselves as the detritus of society than with the invisible hand that has done the accumulating and arranging, this cluster of documentary-style images create what single might refer to as a powerful "presence of absence."

Yet almost as pretty soon as we begin to become fascinated with of the like kind details as the empty mayonnaise jar, or the begging sign that reads "Will help Me Reaise (please) $300 For diet - in GOD we trust," single begins to feel a little uneasy about like voyeurism. These photographs play not on some of the same emotions that daytime talk-shows do - our fascination with the details of other people's lives, and, allowing we are ashamed to admit it, our taking satisfaction in the evidence that we are somehow or other privileged, having escaped their fate: economically, socially, mentally or physically Here, however, the intrusion is perhaps more insidious, for Hernandez's photographs are at handed according to the conventions of art. Additionally, we are not informed as to Hernandez's relationship to those he pick outs to represent. Are these places wilded or could their occupants turn back at any moment? What is Hernandez's relationship to these people? Does he have approval to photograph their "homes"?

It is questions of that kind as these that would be suitable to address in the introduction. Unfortunately, instead of discussing a philosophy that might be subservient to to justify such a material substance of work, Hernandez and Baltz's writing alone seems to aggravate such questions. the two Hernandez and Baltz presume that the bare taking of such pictures, and offering them up for public display and consumption, is self-evidently "activist art," although they pass over to inform the reader as to exactly what action this work is suppos to incite and from whom. Not alone do Hernandez and Baltz affront by an insulting oversimplification of class divisions into "victims" and "winners," on the other hand to top it off, the homeles are patronizingly depicted as a homogenous clump of helpless, "evicted" "casualties," who are apparently incapable of speaking for themselves, or flat as far as Hernandez indicates, being nuncupative to. Such oversimplification and holier-than-thou preachiness is particularly suspicious coming from a man who has chosen to forward his career end publishing photographs of the greatest in quantity private hide-aways of those presumably les economically or mentally advantaged than he, in volumes that may well end up decorating the expensive coffee tables of his accused "lumpen rich." Although Hernandez would certainly address to think of himself as recording landscapes for the homeles he follows only in offering the viewer landscapes of the homeles in a work that in the extremity can only be regarded as a crops of the artist's own astonishing lack of self-awareness with regard to his subject

COPYRIGHT 1996 Visual Studies Workshop

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