When Jerry Hsu left the Bay Area for Los Angeles in his 20s, the longtime pro skater traded the camcorder he’d wielded for most of his life for a Leica M7. Finding himself in an unfamiliar city to preserve a long-term relationship, Hsu leaned into his esoteric street photography practice, developing an outsider’s eye for LA’s rhythms.
Fifteen years later, Hsu’s new book, How About Never, documents the beginning of his romance with the city—and the unraveling of the relationship that first brought him there.
Where does your fascination with LA come from?
I realized at the end of the project that the book is actually more about my relationship with my wife than it is about LA. We were falling in love when the earliest photos in the book were made, and the latest photos were made as we were deciding to separate. She’s a main character in the book—and the first person in it—but her face is only shown once, at the very end. This body of work really takes me through a lot of what I was feeling, what we were both feeling, during our marriage.
What aspects of the relationship does it reflect?
The imagery ranges from bleakness and decay to hopefulness and beauty. Little moments—whether flowers behind a fence or a car on fire—were just proxies for my emotional state. Even the other people in the book are proxies for those ups and downs. Sometimes they’re injured, or they seem contemplative or out of place. I felt all those things.
Are the other people in it mostly friends or strangers?
Mostly strangers. And in a way you can live with someone for a really long time and feel like you don’t know them. All the strangers I chose, I think, spoke to how I felt like I didn’t know someone that was close to me.
Did this project strengthen your relationship with the city?
LA is still really mysterious to me. If ever a day comes that it does not feel mysterious to me, I will probably leave.
What’s the next project?
It’s really about the way I grew up, where I grew up. Five years ago, on a visit back home [in San Jose], I found all these Hi8 tapes from our family camcorder in my room. They were from 1993, when I was probably 12. The footage is a mixture of my mom filming family gatherings and me filming outside in this new world of skating I had discovered. She captured her version of the American dream, and I was simultaneously capturing my own. It’s also about being the child of immigrants in America, which was a very weird and difficult thing for me. Becoming a pro skateboarder at 16 is an unusual twist in that story. I was between two worlds to begin with, but I also had this totally different world to navigate. I took the work ethic and determination my Asian parents gave me and put it somewhere very unexpected. Skateboarding gave me a ticket out and a life I never thought was possible. The confusion of growing up between their world, my world, and this completely different world—that’s the idea.
Have you ever photographed your family?
Ironically, they don’t like being photographed. And I also don’t spend that much time with them—I’m a little disconnected from my family. I think my parents have a difficult time understanding what I’m doing. Every choice—being a skateboarder, being an artist or a photographer—it’s difficult for them. My mom is more like, “That’s cool.” But my father is just like, “What are you doing?”
Last question, how does your ex feel about being in the book and the project?
I think she’s very proud of it, and of me. We have a very good relationship—we didn’t end on bad terms. We both just realized we had to go in different directions. She has always been a tremendous supporter of what I do, because being with a photographer is probably extremely annoying in a lot of nuanced ways. But I don’t know how she truly feels.
And I’ll just say one more thing—I have many beautiful portraits of her, but none of that is in the book. It’s all the back of her head, except one; you don’t really know it’s her. I didn’t do it on purpose. I just realized at the end that the ones I chose are mysterious. I think it speaks to how mysterious she was to me throughout our entire relationship. I know her better than probably anybody, but at the same time I don’t.
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