ESSAYS
selected writings and interviews
LAST WHISPERS PRESENTATION AT UNESCO
by Lena Herzog
November 21st, 2021
“Language is our first creative act, and thus it is the most democratic form of art: we all do language. However, rapidly, we are losing most of them. At an unprecedented speed, faster than the extinction of some species, our linguistic diversity—the very means by which we know ourselves—is eroding …”
UNFRAMED by LACMA
LENA HERZOG’S “LAST WHISPERS”
Interview with Elizabeth Gerber
10 June 2019
“Ultimately, human language capacity always stunned me. It is our first, highly abstract and foundational creative act that we all do, and it is the key to how we define the world and ourselves in it, how we think. The fact that human creativity is so vast and various is an optimistic proposition. The fact of linguistic extinction is not only alarming but is difficult to address because the form this particular extinction takes is silence. This difficulty confounded and obsessed me. So the project came about from this long haunting wonder.”
BROKEN NATURE:
LAST WHISPERS
Essay by Lena Herzog
16 October 2018
“I realized that indigenous communities give up their languages and switch to dominant ones under pressure from the forces of globalization. My next natural iteration of this idea involved shedding the images of the speakers and having only voices in a forest. When a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? This old philosophical trope, the basic epistemological exercise, seemed handy. What is our sense of the unobserved, unheard worlds? I have come to think of this old exercise as one in empathy: Does it matter that trees and universes collapse all around us? Somewhere, between our obliviousness to others and our own inevitable oblivion, rest the scales of some brutal justice.”
MoMA R&D:
WHY WORDS MATTER
Talk by Lena Herzog
Curated by Paola Antonelli
16 May 2018
“Silence. What might it mean? Does it mean anything at all? Could it be a signal of death or of possibility, “a hand extended” (as John Berger said) or is it the silence of despair?
Maybe it means nothing at all.
In the Spanish culture of flamenco, silencio—silence—is usually the most dramatic moment, coming after a great buildup in tempo and revealing of the entire song or dance; it is then, in that silence, that your heart skips a beat. During silencio, the words and the gestures get imprinted on your mind and, more importantly, your heart.”
MUSIC & LITERATURE:
A CONVERSATION WITH LENA HERZOG
Interview with Cynthia Haven
19 May 2016
“I need that last breath, that sense of becoming the thing I’m photographing—as if my soul jumped out of me and into that person. I need that brief second, that possession, and so that last breath is crucial. When I am responding to motion, to a dance or to Strandbeests, that’s what I’m reflecting—something that’s in me. It’s not technically photographing something and making sure the viewer understands this motion. It’s this after-image effect, the moment when your heart sank because you saw that. And it translates. It’s a mystical moment. I don’t know why it translates, but I know that it does.”
FABRIK:
BEEST IN SHOW
Interview with Lanee Lee
13 April 2015
Photographer Lena Herzog’s splendid black and white studies of Dutch artist Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests, kinetic sculptures that derive their motion entirely from the presence of beach winds.
HARPER'S MAGAZINE:
SEDI VACANTI: PORTFOLIO FROM ROME AND THE VATICAN
Portfolio and a short essay by Lena Herzog
4 March 2013
A feeling of suspense is hanging over the Eternal City. Italians at the moment are without a pope and without a functioning government. “These are crazy times, incredible,” says a former administrator of the presidential Quirinal Palace. “But we are Italians, and we’ve seen a lot throughout history.” His colleague in the palace gardens agrees. “We live in a place where every stone has a very long history,” she says. “Something will happen and all this will be resolved.”
HARPER'S MAGAZINE:
THE LONG DRAW
On the trail of an artistic mystery in the American West
Portfolio by Lena Herzog, story by Jeremy Miller
January 2012
VANITY FAIR:
PORTRAITS OF SUPER-FANDOM
Portfolio by Lena Herzog, story by Julie Miller
August 2012
Earlier this month, Russian-born photographer Lena Herzog traveled to San Diego to chronicle Comic-Con, the annual comic-and-fantasy convention known for attracting meticulously costumed fans, in fine-art format. After capturing dozens of attendees in quiet moments, Herzog—whose work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Paris Review—passed along a selection of her portraits to Vanity Fair. Below, a close-up look at some of the convention’s most fanciful costumes, and the people behind them.
THE BELIEVER (MCSWEENEYS)
Interview with Lawrence Weschler, 2011
Back in 1594, in the very heart of the period we will be considering in the pages that follow, Sir Francis Bacon, while prescribing the essential apparatus for “a compleat and consummate Gentleman” in his Gesta Grayorum, suggested that in attempting to achieve “within a small compass a model of the universal made private,” any such would-be magus would almost certainly want to compile “a goodly huge Cabinet, wherein whatsoever the Hand of Man by exquisite Art or Engine, hath made rare in Stuff, Form, or Motion, whatsoever Singularity, Chance and the shuffle of things hath produced, whatsoever Nature hath wrought in things that want Life, and may be kept, shall be sorted and included.”
BAILWICK (THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CINEMATOGRAPHERS)
LENA HERZOG'S CAMERA FINDS "LOST SOULS"
Interview with John Bailey, ASC
18 December 2011
There was an electrical power blackout the day that seventeen-year-old Elena Pisetski first encountered a collection of jarred fetuses in the galleries of St. Petersburg’s Kunstkamera Palace, where an eerie light seeped in from the windows. Pisetski was a student at the university’s Philology Faculty located on the embankment of the Neva River, next door to the beautiful aquamarine-colored mansion housing the scientific specimens of Dr. Frederik Ruysch. Ruysch was Dutch, one of the legions of seekers of new knowledge who, during the age of exploration of the New World, collected thousands of related and unrelated artifacts from his native Holland as well as from distant lands, into what were called Wunderkammern (Cabinets of Wonder).
CABINET MAGAZINE:
ARTIST PROJECT:
RHAPSODY IN DEATH
Portfolio by Lena Herzog, essay by Sina Najafi
2009
From the earliest wunderkammern of Ole Worm and Athanasius Kircher to the more modern genes of the natural history museum and the hunting trophy, taxidermy (from the Greek, literally an “arrangement of skin”) has always occupied a slippery position somewhere between the worlds of science and art.
THE PARIS REVIEW:
INCOMPATIBLE WITH LIFE
Portfolio by Lena Herzog, essay by Philip Gourevitch
2009
“We do not allow anyone to see it, let alone photograph it,” the director of Vienna’s Federal Museum of Pathology at the Narrenturm—the Tower of Fools—told Lena Herzog when she first attempted to visit.
THE PARIS REVIEW:
AIRSHIP
Portfolio by Lena Herzog, essay by Philip Gourevitch
2008
Graham Dorrington is an Englishman who maintains a collection of antique farm tools, assembled by his late father. It contains some eight hundred pieces: sheep shears and dyke shovels, a horse-grooming scraper and a muck rake, a variety of manure knives, a bull nose ring, an assortment of turnip choppers, all manner of breastplows, and something called a wooden dibber.
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE:
THE LIGHT STUFF
Portfolio by Lena Herzog, essay by Margaret Wertheim
2004