Jerry Hsu grew up in San Jose, about an hour south of San Francisco, and, for a time, he assumed he would never leave. He didn\u2019t need to. In the late nineties and two-thousands, Hsu and his daredevil friends had proudly put their sleepy Silicon Valley city on the map as an unlikely skateboarding capital. He noticed that young skateboarders from around the country were moving to San Jose, \u201cand it had to do with my group of friends and these videos we were making,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt\u2019s like when a random city becomes very important for some random reason. We were able to have our slice of heaven.\u201d<\/p>\n
The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Hsu was a precocious talent and became a professional skateboarder in his mid-teens. Magazines sent photographers to San Jose to shoot pictures of him, and he eventually became interested in their craft, what kind of gear they were using, the parallels between their respective art forms. His mother would drive him to the local Barnes\u00a0& Noble, where he grew fascinated with how Nan Goldin<\/a> and Larry Clark<\/a> chronicled the micro-scenes around them. (She also famously procured him a concrete parking block so that he could practice tricks at home.) As skateboard companies sent him around the world in his late teens and twenties, he began obsessively taking photographs of the strange, funny, often macabre things he came across, and publishing them on Tumblr or in Vice magazine.<\/p>\n In 2011, Hsu moved to Los Angeles, primarily for a relationship, and to further his career as a skateboarder. But he also felt a private excitement about spending time photographing a city \u201cthat was more rich with things I wanted to see.\u201d With a body thrashed by occupational hazards, Hsu, who is forty-four, orients his life nowadays around running Sci-Fi Fantasy, his skate company, and roaming the city to take pictures. His latest book, \u201cHow About Never<\/a>,\u201d is a brutal and wondrous chronicle of the sights he has sought out these past fifteen years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jerry Hsu grew up in San Jose, about an hour south of San Francisco, and, for a time,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1044709,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1582,276,2961,224,5337,245527,3092],"class_list":["post-1044708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-la","tag-los-angeles","tag-losangeles","tag-photographers","tag-photography"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117217894381076222","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1044708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1044709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1044708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1044708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1044708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}