Published by SKIRA. By Silvia Burini, Giuseppe Barbieri.
Through innovative experimentation, Russian American photographer, filmmaker and conceptual artist Lena Herzog (born 1970) fuses Renaissance engraving practices, early techniques of developing and printing photographic images, and cutting-edge virtual reality and immersive technologies. Her work investigates the universal mystery of being human, from the cabinets of curiosities of the 18th and 19th centuries to the hollowed-out rock formations atop tepuis in Amazonia. In her latest projects, she confronts and denounces the extinction of thousands of languages and foretells the possible and final collapse of the planet. These are images between shadow and light, which, as with Goya, pursue the truth of things, gestures and faces, and in which we find echoes of her childhood phantoms at the foothills of the Ural Mountains. This volume is the first comprehensive monograph for Herzog, chronicling three decades of her multidisciplinary practice.
