For Rodeo Drive, curator and writer Neville Wakefield caught up by phone with photographer Anthony Hernandez in isolation in Fairfield, a remote town in the middle of the prairie in Idaho, to talk about his revelatory Rodeo Drive 1984 photographs, and what caught his eye.

We invite you to enjoy this conversation and special exhibition of timeless photographs of Rodeo Drive.

Neville: Why weren’t you successful? 

Anthony: They just weren’t working as pictures, so I decided I’d go to Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, somewhere different, where I’d never photographed before. I made the first “successful” picture (#21) of that very famous little cafe, I was so excited, I just thought, “wow, this is great!” So I started making more pictures and never thought again about the magazine. It was the first group of color photographs of people.

Neville: You were there on Rodeo Drive, but also seemingly invisible – did you consider yourself a  street photographer?

Anthony: When I started in 1969 in downtown L.A., I didn’t really know a thing about the history of photography. But as a kid. I really enjoyed walking from downtown L.A. to where we lived in Boyle Heights.  I’d walk in different directions, taking different routes. I was just walking and looking and then later, when I  picked up a camera, it made sense that I was still walking, but with a purpose. Later, I got to know photographers looking at books and I met Lee Friedlander among others, I didn’t really go to school or think that I was going to be a photographer or an artist– that wasn’t in my background. It was an accident.  

Rodeo Drive started because it was color. All of the pictures of Rodeo Drive are slightly overexposed. I shot with transparency film then because you’d get your film back and you could see immediately that one was overexposed or underexposed. I like the look and feel of this kind of “hot picture in the spotlight” so I  decided I’d slightly overexpose my film. I was shooting very quickly and it was even harder shooting in color than in black and white. So Rodeo Drive was more intense, but at the same time, more exciting. I called it a  dance.

In all the Rodeo Drive pictures, I’m actually walking, and in the case of the person who is sitting at the table in the restaurant, I’m walking past with my camera coming up to my eye, turning, shooting and then moving.  The camera’s always wrapped up in my hand as I’m walking. If I see something, I’ll turn and shoot.  Obviously, you’d have to pre-fix the focus and you didn’t know until you got your film back if you’d got that shot in the zone of focus. I like that way of working quickly as a street photographer, even Garry Winogrand says he was always dancing.  

I was always trying to concentrate on something that’s very, very specific, the light, the people, and I was always trying to be invisible. Some of my favorite Rodeo Drive pictures are those in which the people aren’t aware that they’re having their photograph taken, even though I’m really close to them, And to flip it the other way there are the people knowing that I’m taking a picture of them right then. I like both scenarios. 

Many years later Joshua Chuang, a curator at Yale, saw the pictures and put me in touch with Michael Mack at  Mack Books in London, who said, “let’s do a book!”. Ralph Rugoff wrote the introduction and it got a lot of attention – it was a big deal then, but not in 1984. 

Neville: The color of Rodeo Drive and everything about that environment is very different to downtown L.A. or your earlier work- it must have been a very alien landscape for you? 

Anthony: Rodeo Drive was very, very nice because if I took a break I’d go and have a coffee at a very nice little place and sit outside. I would take a break and have a cup of coffee in downtown L.A too, but it was different, it was a lot harder – you know, tough, bleak surfaces, and Rodeo Drive is sometimes quite beautiful, the light and just the atmosphere is completely different. So I enjoyed that. I’d bump into Gary (Winogrand) and he’d say, ‘OK, we’ll meet later and have coffee’. And that’s what we did. 

Neville: LA is a city of extremes that combines the utopic and the dystopic. I see in your work a  complete range of social issues from the homeless to Rodeo Drive, Have these kinds of dichotomies always been a driving factor in your work and when you first went to Rodeo Drive, was that something that you were aware of and thinking about? 

Anthony: Well, yes, from the gritty streets of downtown L.A to Beverly Hills where I had never hung out before, and then from black and white to color – it was very new to me and I liked it. 

Picture (#10) is very special because I usually photograph people coming toward me. Here I’m waiting to  cross the street. Everybody’s waiting for the signal to change. As I turn around, I see this whole family, and I  take that picture so quickly. If I hadn’t turned around, I’d never have imagined that, because I’m always  looking at what’s in front of me. And there’s a kind of socially visceral aspect to the young girl with her hand held up to her neck. 

Neville: In the eighties, Rodeo Drive had become a coveted hot spot for fashion and style – how much was an interest in fashion a driving force in your work? 

Anthony: I don’t think I was thinking about it, except for a girl, in a very beautiful dress that she designed for herself. At that split moment when I was photographing her, it wasn’t just her dress, it’s the patterns, a clown on the right, but also her glasses, all these circles everywhere. This is an example of something catching my eye so quickly that I immediately took the picture. There are some women that wore these outrageous outfits, but I wasn’t thinking I had to make certain kinds of pictures because of certain kinds of fashion.