Jerry Hsu Turned 15 Years in LA Into a Story About Love and Letting Go
“The city is like my subconscious. It sends me messages through imagery,” says Jerry Hsu about his home city of Los Angeles. “I’m catching it and, when I wake up, I have to try to make sense of what it’s telling me.”
In a new book published by MACK, How About Never, the designer and photographer has found a way to channel nearly two decades of the ways LA has shaped his inner life. Hsu’s curiosity, honed through years as a professional skateboarder, offers a fresh perspective on the beauty and chaos of a city that has long inspired visual artists. His practice, he explains, relies on instinct and treats photographs as descriptors — visual representations of his feelings the moment he made them.
In conversation with Highsnobiety, Hsu speaks about the way of seeing he developed through skateboarding and how it carries over to his photos; how photography can act as a metaphor for letting go of ideals and coming to terms with reality; and how, after everything, the only way to move forward is with hope.
For someone who hasn’t yet flipped through How About Never, how would you describe the book?
It’s very diaristic. It’s a little bit cliché to try to be like, ‘These are just the things that are around me,’ but honestly, these are photographic representations of my emotional state. I had to go into my archive and really figure out what the narrative was going to be, what the rhythm was going to be like. It took a lot of editing and a lot of self-reflection to understand what I was trying to say. It mainly has to do with my curiosity regarding intimacy, isolation, invisibility, and how I seemingly cannot express how I feel in any other way besides making these photos.
I’m basically telling the story of how I felt living in Los Angeles from about 2011 to the present. It’s not about a place; it’s how I felt in this place. There’s a lot of ups and downs. Coming here was a bit of a rebirth. I had an entire relationship and marriage here, and it ended basically when the book ends. I hate the phrase “time capsule,” but the chronology of the book is the length of my marriage. The relationship with my wife is kind of a secret narrative of the book. She’s in there a lot, but she’s a little bit hidden. You only see her face once.
The photographs span about 15 years. While you were making them, did you have any sense that they might eventually become a book, or did that idea come later?
I make photographs of the things that I think will be important to me later. It’s all just instinct. I don’t really have a master plan. I don’t make many distinctions. I make very quick decisions. It’s like a diary: You make notes, and maybe someday you can draw on them to tell a story.
It’s like you're piling things up.
Yeah, it’s sort of like stacking. I just don't know where it’s going to fit because my story is still unknown to me. When you sit down to edit, that’s when you exercise a [different] part of your brain. And that’s a pretty painful process. It’s also a collaborative process because I need to show it to people I trust. Like the publisher and the editors. Listening to people who have a more objective perspective is important because for me, and for a lot of photographers, we start to form emotional bonds with certain images, especially when we rationalize why they work.
Did you cut any images you felt were important?
Yes, I did. I’m friends with editors; I showed them the work, and they would point to certain things and be like, “Why this one?” And if I couldn’t answer, I had to remove it.
It took about two years to edit it. It took a long time to understand that the photos are all made in Los Angeles between 2011 to 2025. Setting that parameter was actually very liberating because I could remove anything that was not taken here during that time period. I had traveled during this time, I had created work that I really enjoyed, but when I created this disciplined parameter, that’s when it really opened up.
I showed Ed Templeton an edit of this book maybe 10 years ago. He was like, “I think you’re just trying to show all your bangers, and it’s not really making sense.” Which was a very, very smart thing to say because I was doing that. You need someone to tell you that it doesn’t make sense.
Or that it’s not time yet, or to keep going.
Keep going, be patient, move it around, but don’t move it around forever.
How did you know when you’d finished the book?
In the past year and a half of editing this book we were separating, and it dawned on me at a certain point that I was creating the final edits while going through this very difficult process. It’s a representation of what I was going through.
There are a lot of opposing forces. There’s fire, there’s water, there’s hope, despair. There are concepts in the book that symbolically represent the chaos, but also the ultimate connection that is felt in a marriage.
Was it a cathartic process?
There’s this sense of failure sprinkled throughout the book. Letting go of these ideals. Photography is like that as well. It’s such an idealistic practice, but you have to come to terms with your own reality at the end because you can just hide forever and never show anyone. There are a lot of references to death, actual death, and to me, I think that is more of a precursor to rebirth. The book was a cathartic way to deal with it.
It’s funny because I had no idea the marriage narrative was there until very, very close to the end. We were breaking up, and I finally understood I had edited the book in a way that this is the story I was telling. I looked at the photos of my wife in it; her back is turned to me a lot. It felt like a symbolic representation of how I viewed her. Other photos in the book represent how lovely and alluring and stunning she is, but they’re not photos of her. I’m photographing flowers through a foggy window, or flowers through a gate or something like that.
The main thing that people ask me is, “Wow, is LA really like this?” And I’m like, “Yeah, it’s a gigantic, sprawling metropolis.” There are like 50 little worlds [in LA]. It’s so vast and endless. It’s like when you have a dream, and your subconscious is sending you messages through imagery. Your subconscious and your conscious don’t speak the same language, but they do speak the language of imagery. The city is like my subconscious, and it is sending me messages through imagery. When I wake up, I have to try to make sense of what it’s telling me. They’re all riddles.
How did growing up skating give you a particular way of reading Los Angeles that informs your photography
Skateboarding makes you highly suspicious that your environment is hiding something. I’m constantly like, “OK, what’s in this alley? I’ve never been down this street before.” That’s the whole mentality of trying to find skate spots: trying to appropriate reality and the environment to a specific goal. That’s a very poignant carryover. It informs how you look. At the same time, I don’t think all skateboarders fully embrace the potential they have as observers. I really leaned into it hard. But I’m not a better observer than anyone else. I’m just ready to stand in one place for hours because I feel like something might happen.
Do you go out specifically intending to make photographs, or does most of the work come from having a camera with you and responding to things as they happen?
I would say it’s 50/50. There are days when I’s like, “OK, just get out the door and just be out there. It doesn’t matter if you feel hopeful or unhopeful or if negative expectations are building up inside of you.” But to be honest, the other 50% is just being ready at all times. A lot of this stuff comes when I’m on my way to do something else. A lot of people think there’s some sort of trick, but the only real secret is that if you notice something or are anticipating something, stop everything you’re doing.
I notice this when I’m with other people: They’ll see something I find very interesting, but they don't stop. They’re just like, ‘’Oh wow, that was crazy.’’ And I’m like, ‘’You have to pull over right now.’’ That’s why photographing for me is very solitary, because I do not like the idea of annoying anybody.
The type of photography I do is about being able to build up a tolerance for basically receiving nothing and having very, very tough days. I can go out for five hours, six hours, seven hours a day for five days in a row and come home with nothing. That is just a part of the process.
Despite the book’s generally somber mood, it seems to end on a hopeful note. Would you agree?
That’s a good observation. The last photo was difficult because I didn’t know how to end it. The cat photo — I saw what it was trying to tell me. It was a message of hope for the future and a little bit of playfulness. There are motifs that are pretty bleak, pretty heavy, very emotional and difficult to process, but I wanted to leave everything with this photo. It makes me feel good. It’s like, it’s me and I’m still going, despite what I went through. I still have the spryness, the instinct. It’s really about the movement, right? Just keep moving. The show must go on; the cat doesn’t give a fuck about anything. It’s just trying to get to the next thing it wants to enjoy. That’s where I’m at now, too.
