Lena Herzog, an American conceptual artist living in Los Angeles, California, has established herself as a unique voice in contemporary art through her multidisciplinary approach that bridges science and artistic expression. Born in Russia in 1970, Herzog immigrated to the United States in 1990 and became a naturalized citizen in 1999. Her artistic work centers around themes of ritual and gesture, loss and transformation, exploring these concepts through the intersection of art and science both as subject matter and creative process.
Herzog's innovative approach combines ancient photographic techniques with contemporary and experimental alternative printing methods, as well as cutting-edge sound technologies, immersive installations, and virtual reality for various projects. Growing up among scientists in the Ural Mountains on the western border of Siberia, she pursued her education at Saint Petersburg University in Russia, studying languages and literature, before continuing her academic journey in California at Mills College and Stanford University, where she focused on the history and philosophy of science.
After discovering photography in the late 1990s, Herzog apprenticed with Italian and French master printers, concentrating on ancient and alternative photographic processes. Open to experimentation in her darkroom, Herzog has combined techniques from photography's early days, such as pyrogallol development, with contemporary digital methods. Her bold and captivating perspective transcends boundaries and bridges different levels of life, time, and memory.
'Lena Herzog: In a Vanishing World' represents the first comprehensive monograph of her artistic career and work, published by Skira, Milan. This exhaustive review of three decades of activity showcases Herzog's exploration of universal human mysteries, from 18th and 19th-century Cabinets of Curiosities to rock formations carved at the summit of Amazonian tepuis, from profound Western rituals to the emptiness of nameless Far Eastern lands. The various portfolios, arranged transversally throughout the book, offer a fascinating cartography of our era and history.
In a recent interview with Patricia Lanza, Herzog revealed the collaborative process behind selecting works for this seventh book of hers. She worked closely with the book's authors, professors Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri, who served as her exhibition curators during two seasons of the Venice Art Biennale (2022 and 2024) and became intimately familiar with her work. The selection process also involved extraordinary photo editor Stacey Clarkson, with whom Herzog has collaborated for many years at Harper's Magazine. Clarkson played a key role in the final image selection and identifying the fundamental currents of Herzog's work.
The title 'In a Vanishing World' emerged from Herzog's collaborators, and she admits it struck an emotional chord. 'I pursue things that are disappearing; ghosts haunt me,' Herzog explains. 'I feel like the world is slipping through my fingers like sand, like water... I try to hold onto it, but I can't. But well, I'm a photographer, so I do what all photographers do: I capture the moment through the infinitely small and make it a memory, a photograph.' She describes her work's essence as capturing reality and re-enchanting it, perceiving beauty stripped of all kitsch, just the beating heart of an instant or a thing.
Herzog's photographic process has evolved significantly over time, influenced by diverse sources. Originally aspiring to be a writer, living between two languages disrupted that initial plan, leading her toward academic work in philosophy, particularly philosophy of language and linguistics, as well as history and philosophy of science. She began photography relatively late at age 27, using her grandfather's camera, a Leica derivative, starting with black and white film and street photography.
Her first residence was in Spain, where Goya's influence, deeply embedded in her mind since childhood, unconsciously led her to seek out bullfights and hooded penitents during Holy Week. This resulted in her first book, 'Tauromaquia: the Art of Bullfighting,' published by British publisher Periplus Publishing London and edited by Danièle Naveau. Herzog then decided she needed to master her tools and discover her craft, secretly joining a flamenco class in San Francisco taught by the great Yaelisa.
This flamenco experience became a baptism by fire, teaching her to photograph multiple bodies in rapid movement between giant windows and floor-to-ceiling mirrors, with a four-stop difference between the darkest and brightest corners. Using a manual Leica M6 without a light meter, she quickly learned to judge light and composition. The experience also resulted in another book, 'Flamenco: Dance Class.' She began renting a darkroom on Polk Street, learning to develop and print film, making all her shooting errors painfully evident but providing invaluable learning.
After moving to Los Angeles in 2001 with her husband, Herzog built her own studio and darkroom. French master printer Marc Valesella taught her extensively, while Milan-based printer Ivan Dalla Tana showed her how to experiment with different established processes and invent new ones to realize ideas. Pyrogravure became her preferred technique for developing film, and split-tone printing became her preferred process.
Herzog acknowledges that ideas learned from painters and philosophers, literature and music influenced her work even more than fellow photographers' work, despite admiring many colleagues. She cites diverse influences including Ezra Pound's small essay on Chinese characters, Russian cosmists, Goya's drawings, and John Berger's writings on art. 'A photographer doesn't have time to hide,' she explains. 'What you've seen, read, and dreamed merges in a fraction of a second and reveals what remains in your soul.'
Currently, Herzog is completing what she considers her most impactful project: a trilogy titled 'TRINITY,' lasting over an hour. This experiential and immersive poem is radically experimental, combining immersive animation, spatialized music, and sound design to address the Anthropocene era and the dream of a solution. The trilogy consists of three chapters: 'Last Whispers,' dealing with cultural extinction; 'Any War Any Enemy,' addressing humanity's physical extinction due to nuclear war; and 'Reversal,' serving as a counterpoint to the first two chapters.
'TRINITY' is available in all immersive formats and adapts to site-specific installations such as domes, spheres, room-scale video mapping, or virtual reality, expanding its reach. Oversized murals, objects, canvas prints, and mezzotints can accompany the immersive 'TRINITY' exhibition, as they did for the Venice Biennale exhibitions in 2022 and 2024. While representing a break from photography, the work remains totally influenced by her photographic practice, with many three-dimensional objects created from or inspired by her photographs.
Working with a team including VR engineer Jonathan Yomayuza, animator Amanda Tasse, and composers Marco Capalbo and Mark Mangini, among others, Herzog describes the challenging learning process of venturing into complex new media and collaborating with others after solitary, adventurous photographic work. However, she finds great satisfaction in combining her artistic imagination with philosophy, music, and politics to create something totally new—a synthesis of various media and ideas forming an organic whole that reflects her worldview.
The most striking difference from photography, Herzog notes, lies in the relationship to framing. While a photograph has a frame, an immersive work does not, or rather, the observer finds themselves inside the frame. Herzog continues working on completing this groundbreaking trilogy, marking a significant evolution in her artistic journey from traditional photography to immersive multimedia experiences.
