Lena Herzog

Who is Lena Herzog?

Lena Herzog is a Russian American documentary and fine art photographer.

Born Elena Pisetski in 1970 in the Russian city of Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, Herzog moved to St. Petersburg in 1987 to attend the Philological Faculty of St. Petersburg 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. Herzog started taking photographs in 1997 and studied photographic printing techniques with the Italian master printer Ivan Dalla Tana in Milan and later with French master printer Marc Valesella. She combines some of the very early photographic darkroom processes with contemporary techniques to achieve her desired effects.

Her work 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 Mundo The Believer, The British Journal of Photography, and Cabinet, among others.