Jerry Hsu: How About Never
Just published by MACK this August 2026, “How About Never” collects photographs taken by Jerry Hsu in Los Angeles over a fifteen-year period, starting in 2011. Rather than attempting to describe the city through its familiar mythology of sunlight, glamour, and possibility, Hsu turns his attention to its fractures, accidents, and strange visual coincidences, constructing a portrait of Los Angeles that feels simultaneously intimate, unstable, and unexpectedly alive.
In the book, damaged fences, abandoned objects, wounds, crashed cars, stained mattresses, and burning buildings coexist with portraits of friends, strangers, and people encountered almost by chance. Violence and tenderness repeatedly occupy the same space. Hsu is less interested in documenting individual events than in the emotional charge they leave behind, allowing seemingly unrelated photographs to accumulate in a world suspended between beauty and discomfort, humor and melancholy, destruction and the possibility of rebirth.
Los Angeles itself gradually becomes one of the book’s central characters. Hsu described the city not as a single, coherent place, but as hundreds of small worlds that can alternately reveal themselves or remain completely inaccessible. His experience as a skater is fundamental to this perspective. Skateboarding taught him to read architecture instinctively, to search the streets, buildings, and overlooked spaces for possibilities invisible to most. Photography extends this same attitude, transforming ordinary urban details through curiosity, attention, and recontextualization.
Yet, beyond the portrait of Los Angeles, “How About Never” also contains a far more personal narrative. While editing the photographs, Hsu realized that the project had unintentionally documented the duration of his marriage. His ex-wife appears throughout the book, though her face is visible only once. The earliest images date back to the time they were falling in love, while some of the most recent were taken when they were making the decision to separate. Other portraits, whether of strangers, wounded bodies, or intimate encounters, began to function for Hsu as indirect reflections of that relationship. What initially seemed like a book about a city gradually revealed itself as the chronicle of a shared life unfolding within it.
The title “How About Never” predates the book itself by over a decade. Hsu has said he carried this phrase with him long before he understood what the project would become. Its apparent negativity suggests denial and the constant possibility of failure, both elements he associates with photography and creative work in general. But the desolation is deceptive. Hsu has also described himself as deeply obsessed with hope, which makes the title less an expression of resignation and more a refusal to accept easy conclusions.
The resulting sequence moves between the personal and the anonymous, between the private story of a relationship and the broader emotional landscape of Los Angeles. Hsu never resolves the contradictions he encounters. Rather, it allows them to coexist, creating a portrait of a city where damage can contain beauty, failure can lead to something unexpected, and destruction can even become the beginning of something new.
How About Never is published by MACK in a 176-page embossed hardcover edition. A companion exhibition will be presented at Primary Photographic’s Rectangle Room in New York from September 10 to October 3, 2026.
About the Author
Jerry Hsu is an American photographer, artist and professional skateboarder based in Los Angeles. Born in San Jose, California, in 1981, Hsu began skateboarding at a young age and became a professional while still in his teens. Over the following decades he established himself as one of the most distinctive figures in contemporary skate culture, known for a highly technical yet apparently effortless style that has had a lasting influence on street skateboarding. He is also the founder, owner and art director of the skate brand Sci-Fi Fantasy. Photography developed alongside his skateboarding career. Moving constantly through streets, cities and skate environments gave Hsu a particular sensitivity to overlooked details, unexpected encounters and the visual absurdities of everyday life. He has cited photographer and skateboarder Ed Templeton as an important early influence, particularly in helping him recognise that the people and situations surrounding him were themselves worthy photographic subjects. Hsu became known to a wider photographic audience through his contributions to Vice and through online projects such as NAZI GOLD and Table for One. Launched in 2009, NAZI GOLD functioned as a constantly evolving archive of photographs made largely with mobile phones, combining found texts, street observations, friends, strangers and accidental visual juxtapositions. The project eventually became the basis for his acclaimed photobook The Beautiful Flower Is the World, originally published by Anthology Editions and released in a second edition in 2024.
His earlier publications include The Killing Season from 2013, alongside numerous photographic zines and independent projects. His photographs have appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, Vice, iGNANT and Lodown Magazine, and his work has been exhibited internationally in cities including Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, Milan, Stockholm, Prague and Tokyo.
In 2026 MACK published How About Never, a long-term photographic study of Los Angeles made since 2011. Bringing together Hsu’s instinctive approach to street photography with a more personal and introspective narrative, the book explores the city through its contradictions while also tracing, almost unintentionally, the course of a relationship and its end.
