Germán Herrera (b. Mexico City, 1957) has had a long career as a photographer, working in both the tradition of the street photographer and as a constructor of symbolic images. Using digital technology, Herrera merges images of an array of common and enigmatic objects, natural elements, historic references, and textures and atmospheres. In doing so, he conjures a world that is at once wholly real and imagined – a chronicle of the subconscious. Many photographers working with the formats of constructed imagery or photomontage do so with a keen sense of intentionality, as a means of conveying a specific statement or idea. Herrera, in contrast, relies greatly on intuition and emotion, more interested in the possibility of locating meaning outside the arenas or pure intellect and reason.
Herrera has spoken of this body of work as a “book of self,” an expression of the totality of the beliefs, feelings, fears, and myths that reside within him. But in evoking a personal sphere he ultimately creates spaces for the contemplation of the universal. Each image functions as a kind of mirror that offers the potential to recognize something of ourselves; distinct interpretations or memories may be sparked for each viewer. Many of these works have an oneiric quality, as if envisioning fragments (a face or limb, a weathered surface, an old artwork) recalled from dreams but that remain tantalizingly beyond full comprehension. With his resonant mode of image-making, Herrera suggests that these ambiguous forms, and such realms as discontinuity, transience, obscurity, and even emptiness, may be fertile ground for creative transformation. In Herrera’s hands, photography becomes a medium for entering liminal spaces – between the physical and the psychological, the knowable and the unknowable – elusive territories that symbolize the possibility of grasping the metaphysical in the everyday world around us.
Elizabeth Ferrer © 2009
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