A Brief Digression in Appropriation: 1157 Wheeler Avenue, Bronx, New York 10472

These photographs have been appropriated from the real estate sites Zillow and Trulia. They were part of a listing to sell a multi-family home in the Soundview section of the Bronx in early 2016. The poor image quality in part suggests they were made with an early low-resolution digital camera or shot on the lowest settings. I have titled each image simply the necessary information provided in the listing: For Sale: $599,000 (7 Beds, 4 Baths, 3,360 Sqft) 1157 Wheeler Avenue, Bronx, New York 10472.

1157 Wheeler Avenue was the home address of Amadou Diallo and his family, who settled in the Bronx, having emigrated from Guinea in West Africa. In 1999 Amadou Diallo was shot and killed by four plain clothed NYPD officers at this location. You may remember the story. The officers approached Diallo as he entered the vestibule of his building, claiming he fit the description of a serial rapist. Police allege that as they advanced toward Diallo he reached into his pocket and pulled out what they believed to be a gun. The four officers infamously fired 41 shots in total, 19 of which fatally struck the 23 year old. As it turned out Diallo was unarmed and had been reaching for his wallet to show identification. He was heading home after working as a street peddler in Union Square, where he sold VHS tapes, hats, gloves, socks and the like. Officers Sean Carroll, Richard Murphy, Edward McMellon and Kenneth Boss were charged with second-degree murder and found not guilty at a trial in Albany a year later.

I was 18 years old at the time and having grown up in the Bronx remember the moment marked by heated debates and demonstrations around the city. I remember my uncle, who worked nights at the 44th precinct, describing how decisions of life and death are made in a fraction of a second. I remember Pat Lynch, the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association calling to boycott a Bruce Springsteen concert because he wrote a song memorializing Diallo. I remember reading in the Daily News how The State Fraternal Order of Police president called Bruce a "dirtbag" and a "floating fag" for performing the song at Madison Square Garden.  Diallo's parents were in attendance. I remember chants of "Its a wallet, not a gun" from thousands of New Yorkers marching through the streets of lower Manhattan after the officers were acquitted. I remember his mother, Kadiatou Diallo. How she held it together while speaking of her son. How she thanked the crowd and pledged to devote her life to social justice and unity. A pledge she continues to keep. 

I remember the feeling of dejection the next day when the protests received little coverage by the press. Mostly, I remember Rudy Giuliani vehemently defending the officers and emphasizing the decreased overall crime statistics during his term as mayor, seeming to imply that this was collateral damage, a tragic anomaly with no reasons to ask questions about racism, profiling or standard police tactics. Seventeen years later, due in large part to the omnipresence of built-in video cameras in cellular phones, we continue to see incidents involving the killing of unarmed men by police. The victims are disproportionately black. The consequences for the police in question have been null. As I write this a cop in Baltimore has just been acquitted in charges related to the death of Freddie Gray.

What led to me finding these images? I recently discovered that in 1992 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art commissioned the photographer Lewis Baltz, an artist I admire greatly, to produce an archetypal view of the Los Angeles cityscape. Baltz, a native of Southern California known for his grids of impeccable black & white landscape photographs, responded by making a 48 x 96 inch Cibachrome photograph of what appears to be an ordinary intersection in the outskirts of Los Angeles. The photograph 11777 Foothill Blvd, Los Angeles 1993, is the exact site of where Rodney King was brutally beaten by the police, which upon release of the video footage, famously ignited riots across the city. This discovery, along with a string of recent events involving Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Freddy Gray, to name a few, invoked a curiosity to look back at the incident which occurred in my home borough, at a time when we were all asked to give the police the benefit of the doubt, that this was an aberration. The first result in a search of Diallo’s address was a New York Daily News article from 2009 about a tour guide bringing buses full of European tourists to the place of Diallo’s death. The next several results were real estate sites like the aforementioned Zillow and Trulia listing the building for sale. To be certain it was the same building I matched a photograph I found of Diallo and his brother in their home with the same painted window frame as the interior bedroom picture on Zillow. Another picture I found of several police officers in beige trench coats confirmed the exterior of the building. I came to these pictures knowing what happened there. Needless to say, there was no mention of the incident in the listing. 

Real Estate has always been a major industry of New York, but it has never been more incongruous, if not altogether perverse, to the vast majority of its citizens than it is today. Vernacular real estate images, crime scene photographs and appropriated pictures, respectively have all played a role in the history of art photography. Here we see a somber affiliation of all three. Finding these pictures provoked several emotions and questions about value, progress, and the fact that someone bought the building despite what could only be described as the failure of the photographs. The house sold for $565,000 and the listing has since been taken down. 

After several months of having these images with the listing info on my website, I was contacted by a film production company who mistakenly took my appropriation of these images for an actual Real Estate listing. Mistaking me with the owner of the building, they inquired how much it would cost to rent the location for a virtual reality film of the shooting. 

Los Angeles Plays Itself: Anthony Hernandez at SFMOMA

(The following text was published at American Suburb X and can be read with accompanying images here ASX )

It often said that Los Angeles is the most photographed city on earth. It’s not true. It is also said that nobody walks in LA. Another lie. Or at least, in line with the nature of the city itself, its pure deception. The latter statement really means to say that the wealthy and privileged don’t walk. The former statement refers to the endless supply of still images made on or for the sets of Hollywood films, as well as B-roll; the dubious in-between footage in movies, television and news media used to create visual narratives or a change in geography. In “The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory,” Norman Klein writes that while it may be the most photographed, the inadequacy of b-roll imagery is in part why Los Angeles is also the least remembered city in the world. After all when one summonses to their photographic memory the vast archive of still imagery representing city life and the urban landscape, they likely find themselves on a crowded street corner in Manhattan, or the back alleys of Paris, at night, sometime last century. The inaugural exhibition at The Broad museum boasted of many major artists like John Baldessari, Catherine Opie and Ed Ruscha, who made LA their home and are associated with the city. Ironically, the only work in the show that alluded to Los Angeles, the place, was Ed Ruscha’s 1979 minimalist text painting that reads, “Hollywood Is A Verb.”

The first LA picture that comes to my mind was made by Garry Winogrand, a photographer inextricably bound to New York and the work he made there in the 60’s and 70’s. You know the one, Los Angeles, 1969, where three silhouetted women walk toward the corner of Hollywood and Vine, met by a boy in a wheelchair, head bowed and all merciful. If you want to see Los Angeles, playing itself, as it were, in a range of photographs that span the past half-century, well, you have to go to San Francisco. There, at the new and improved San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (or in the beautifully produced catalog), you will find the career retrospective of Anthony Hernandez, an artist to remember.

The son of Mexican immigrants, Anthony Hernandez grew up in Boyle Heights, a working class neighborhood east of the LA River and downtown, which has recently seen new art galleries met by anti-gentrification protests. In the 1960’s, however, Hernandez had no exposure to art. The event that changed his life, pulling him out of a street gang and doing drugs, was his best friend giving him a photography manual published by the navy, which he found in the men’s room at East Los Angeles College. He would later take classes there working in the darkroom, the extent of his formal education.

While Hernandez made pictures in Europe, as well as Vietnam, where he served in the United States Army and had issues of Artforum mailed to him, his strongest work is that which scrutinizes the complex and often elusive social dynamics of his native Los Angeles. In 1969 we see a 22 year-old Hernandez, and protégé of Winogrand’s, successfully employ the language of the street photograph in downtown LA. That same year he ventures out to the west side beaches, where he finds his subjects sundrenched, fully dressed and sprawled out on the sand, as if washed up onto the shore, not by the rollicking waves of the great Pacific, but from the unrelenting tide of the city and country beyond it. Nowhere in sight are the Hollywood hills, its faint sign, nor hints of the eminent socialites murdered by the Manson family that summer. Nowhere in sight is the glitz and glamour, the myth of Los Angeles perpetuated by countless films and dollars. Nowhere in sight is the counter-culture of Dennis Hopper’s LA pictures, not to mention “La La Land.” No, Anthony Hernandez’ sober look at his hometown reminds us that Los Angeles is not the most photographed city in the world, but rather, one of the most culturally, economically and racially divided places in America.

Hernandez claimed that part of the reason he moved away from the 35mm street aesthetic to a large format 5×7 camera, was because he felt in order to thrive making work in that mode, one had to travel to various cities and he couldn’t afford to do so. Another reason could have been that the amount of blocks clustered with pedestrian traffic in LA are few and far between. One of the marvels of Winogrand’s work, for example, is what happens when unlikely pairings of people share the space of his frame. But, the streets of midtown Manhattan back then were a kind of crossroads for every type of city dweller. Los Angeles is physically undemocratic, by both its natural and built landscape. Not to mention, the pace of the city is exponentially slower. This is part of why Hernandez had to employ different ways of working, and travel to different parts of the city, to investigate its social textures. We see workers amongst damaged vehicles in car body repair shops that occupy much of LA in his Automotive Landscape series. In this work, the move to the 5×7 camera serves the photographer well in describing with greater clarity the physical presence of the landscape. One looks at Automotive Landscape #41, of a man working on a truck engine outside an auto body shop, taken slightly from above, and is reminded of Jeff Wall’s An Eviction, 1988/2004 taken from the same vantage point, looking down an ordinary neighborhood street (Its no surprise Wall has championed Hernandez’ work for some time). We see people waiting for the bus on the blighted boulevards of his Public Transit Areas pictures. We see office workers on their lunch breaks sitting in the confines of manicured corporate headquarters. Then he takes us to Rodeo Drive to see where the other half goes to walk the streets, spend their money, see and be seen. This is Hernandez’ first work made in color, giving a pedestrian quality to the prosperous. Red lipstick, gold signage, and various shades of blonde hair materialize. I looked at Rodeo Drive #34, 1984 for several minutes trying to decipher if the subject in the center of the frame was a real woman or a mannequin, before eventually conceding that she was real.

The Rodeo Drive pictures are made on the streets of self-conscious passersby. The work sets up the necessary and stark juxtaposition of Hernandez’ later color pictures, Landscapes For The Homeless. In this work in the late 80’s and early 90’s Hernandez photographs homeless encampments around the city. Homelessness and homeless people makeup part of the vernacular of the landscape of Los Angeles like no other city in this country. Entire blocks and nooks under the freeway are occupied with tents and tarps tied from tree barks to fences. Not to mention the allocated streets downtown known as Skid Row. Hernandez looks at the scraps of land the homeless claim until they can’t, and what little belongings they keep there. What we find are landscapes of cigarette butts and makeshift furniture, the few clothes available and old magazines that drifted in like artifacts from the straight society from which they’ve been evicted. The strongest in the series Landscapes for the Homeless #29, shows a belt, some razor blades, and an uneaten apple, as if proof that God doesn’t exist, that Eden was going to fall either way. The strength of these pictures has much to do with the fact that they are devoid of people. This was an apt yet far from obvious choice by Hernandez at the time. By photographing the spaces the homeless rest in without the people themselves, they avoid the easy clichés and tropes of pseudo-sympathetic photography, and rather function like crime scene photographs. The crime here being the obvious reality that in one of the largest cities in the most developed nation on earth, we accept that tens of thousands of human beings live around us without shelter. From the time Hernandez made these pictures to now, it has only gotten worse. In a conversation with Lewis Baltz which accompanies the series, Hernandez notes the obscenity of the term, “’The Homeless,’ as if they were an organized group with rights, a group you belonged to.”

Baltz then asks Hernandez what he thought of the perceived notion that Atget photographed Paris as if it were a crime scene. “Hard pictures to make,” Hernandez replied. Could we say that about Atget’s pictures? Was Paris worth photographing? Could I look at my own pictures and say ‘was it worth photographing?’ The answer is yes, because nobody else was looking.” Yes, Anthony Hernandez is the Atget of Los Angeles, and it’s a small crime that his career retrospective has no plan to travel to the city it so beautifully and shrewdly examines.