Artist Statement
There is no message to decode. If anything, the transmission of an emotion may take place.
Process Statement
I photograph what feels compelling, attractive, disgusting -the images are correspondences... nods to these connections. Dreams, beliefs, fears, intuition and aesthetics nurse the approach as I move on to amalgamating the image; in the same emotionally conscious and undirected way.
They are not the product of an idea or an association of ideas, but possibly a diary of maps. The biggest challenge as they are constructed is to stay away from thinking, instead concentrating on the emotions that arise.
Germán Herrera was born in Mexico City in 1957. The first of five siblings in a family of psychologists, he inherited his love for photography from his maternal grandfather and an interest in music from his father and maternal grandmother. In 1978 he traveled to California to study photography, where he became interested in Afro Cuban drumming. In 1980 Herrera returned to Mexico and devoted himself to music and commercial photography. In the late 1980s he traveled to Cuba where he produced his last body of documentary work, then stopped working with the camera for eleven years. His interest in spirituality took him to India where he spent six months. This led to a process of self-investigation, including two years of training in Core Energetics (a Neo-Reichian mode of psychotherapy), which contributed fundamental information to his current form of image making. In 2001 Herrera returned to photography, simultaneously discovering the complex potential of the digital environment as a creative tool.
Herrera was recipient of an Artist Residency at the De Young Museum in San Francisco in 2006. He is also the recipient of two Marin Council grants and has been nominated for the Eureka Awards, granted by the Fleischhacker Foundation.
He is presently working on the publication of a monograph with 100 images and a text by Elizabeth Ferrer, curator and writer of the Aperture book Lola Alvarez Bravo and co-editor of the landmark New York Museum of Modern Art publication Latin American Artists of the 20th Century.
His work has been exhibited in North and South America as well as in Europe, and is part of the permanent collections of:
Bolinas Museum, California.
Green Library at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.
Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.
Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas.
Museum of Photographic Arts of San Diego, California.
Portland Art Museum, Oregon.
Zoellner Arts Center, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, amongst others.
He lives in San Rafael, California, with his wife Nayana and two cats.
How to use our image viewer
Click on any of the thumbnail images to launch the viewer. You can then navigate forward and backward within the portfolio by clicking the left or right side of the enlarged image. Click the add to collection checkbox to automatically add an image to your collection. Image tags or search engine keywords appear below the collections' checkbox and each word or phrase is a link to potentially more image matches.
