The title of Anthony Hernandez’s monograph takes its name from our collective penchant for discarding what we no longer find useful; in this case, unfinished houses and the land on which they sit, to the east and northeast of Los Angeles. The project arose from the 2008 recession, which hit California particularly hard, when homebuilders and owners faced loans and mortgages that were worth more than their properties.

Comprising 35 photographs made in desert and high desert cities such as Riverside, Salton City, Lancaster and Palmdale, Discarded opens with an essay by John Rohrbach, Senior Curator of Photography at the Amon Carter Museum where the work was first exhibited in 2016.

Of the photographs, Rohrbach writes: “Where through the 1970s and 1980s the 'New Topographics' generation led by Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz drew photographic attention to the expansion of suburbia across the open West, Anthony Hernandez now asks us to take account of the failures, the pulling back from over-exuberant expectation. Capitalism, of course, is built on optimism and growth, but just as central to its being is failure. We can’t all be winners; bust inevitably follows boom.

While some initiatives survive, others go under, abandoned to the banks and discarded to the scourges of time and happenstance. The subject offers pathos and an enticing undercurrent of violence. But where others generally embrace the romance of the struggle against the harsh climate, emphasizing isolation and self-sufficiency, Hernandez reminds us of the essentialness of community in these rough places.”