Elena Herzog is a Russian-American visual artist and photographer.
Biography
Herzog moved to Leningrad in 1987 to attend the Philological Faculty of Leningrad University, where she studied languages and literature. In 1990 she emigrated to the United States and graduated with a degree in Philosophy from Mills College, specializing in the History and Philosophy of Science. She was also a research consultant at Stanford University. She started taking photographs in 1997 and studied photographic printing techniques with the Italian master printer Ivan Dalla Tana in Milan and later with the French master printer Marc Valesella. She combines some of the very early photographic darkroom processes with contemporary and her own techniques to achieve her desired effects. Her work ranges from classical documentary to the experimental and conceptual and has been published and reviewed in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, El País, El MundoThe Believer, The British Journal of Photography, and Cabinet, among others. Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pasadena Museum of California Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,, the International Center of Photography, and the British Museum, among others. Lena Herzog is an American citizen, naturalized in 1999. Since 1995, she has lived in California with her husband, German filmmaker Werner Herzog, first in San Francisco, and since 2001 in Los Angeles. They have collaborated on several projects including a book of stills from the film which was published by Rizzoli in 2009. Werner Herzog wrote the introduction to Lena Herzog’s book Pilgrims, which was released in 2002. Her book Strandbeest: the Dream Machines of Theo Jansen was published by TASCHEN in 2014. Herzog has authored six books / monographs of photography. In 2016, Herzog's complex video/audio installation Last Whispers: Oratorio for Vanishing Voices, Collapsing Universes and a Falling Tree, in which she collaborated with composer and director Marco Capalbo and sound designer Mark Mangini, premiered at the British Museum in the Living and Dying Gallery adjacent to the Rosetta Stone. A film and surround-sound experience that incorporates archival recordings of endangered languages, Last Whispers began a world tour in 2019.
