How About Never by Jerry Hsu

Jerry Hsu moved to Los Angeles from San Jose when he was 29. How About Never gathers the photographs he has made there since 2011: about fifteen years of the city, seen by a former professional skateboarder who knows its streets from the ground. He stops for things most people pass by, like a discarded toilet, a blood-stained mattress, crashed cars, a bank burning at night, fences bent out of shape, bodily injuries.

In these pictures Los Angeles seems almost alive, and full of contradictions. Hope sits beside despair and beauty beside pain, and a dry, absurd humour runs through even the darkest frames. The portraits look for closeness with people in a city that is often broken and often cruel.

Underneath the city there is a second story. Hsu came to Los Angeles for love, and the years he spent photographing it were also the years his marriage came apart. Near the end of the project he realised the book was more about his relationship with his wife than about LA. None of the pictures spell this out. You feel it in the mood of the sequence, which took him two years to edit: isolation, heartbreak, and some hope.

The title sounds like a shrug, and Hsu admits he is close to nihilistic by default. Still, destruction in these pages is also where change might begin.

• i-D – Jerry Hsu's Nihilistic Photographs of Los Angeles
• AnOther – Jerry Hsu: "Dystopia Is More Present Than Ever"
• Cultured – Jerry Hsu's breakup in a new photobook
• Highsnobiety – Jerry Hsu turned 15 years in LA into a story
• All About Photo – Jerry Hsu: How About Never