The intense colors created by this time-intensive non-digital technique and the lone and
cropped perspectives create an emotional tension. The interiors are locked in space
with no clear sense of time. Time and space fade in and out and planes bleed into one
another. They are borderline hallucinatory environments.
In normal still photographs any change is softened, rendered as a blur, and detail is lost.
I use a technique that captures that detail and boldly emphasizes change in vivid colors.
To maintain the essential ties to reality all work is done in-camera and on-film with no
digital creation or digital manipulation.

I shoot with a medium-format camera and print on a large scale to enhance the impact
of the colors. In addition, the intriguing details of the interactions between colors draw
one into an intimate distance to explore. To me, it is important that the images in this
series impact the viewer both from across the room as well as under very close
inspection. There is a lot of intriguing mystery to the nuances.

View Roman’s Images

Artist Statement:
Some photographers believe their strongest work comes from exploring their immediate surroundings. “I think of myself as a regional photographer,” Loranc says, “but that does not mean the photography cannot be understood beyond the region. Right now people all over the United States indicate to me that regionalism, born of an informed attachment, has universal appeal.” Loranc shoots most of his pictures within an hour’s drive of his home in Modesto, California, but he is also interested in exploring his ancestral roots in Europe. For this reason he makes occasional photographic forays into Poland and Lithuania.

“I’m fascinated by the ancient churches of my homeland,” he says. “These are holy spaces where millions of people have prayed for hundreds of years. They are places of great humility, and remind us how brief our lives are. I feel the same way when I’m photographing ancient groves of native oaks in California. I was unconscious of this when I began, but upon reflection, I think the oaks are just as sacred as the old cathedrals of Europe. They are sacred in that they have survived for so many years. I’m aware that the native people of California held all living things as divine. For me a grove of Valley Oaks is as sacred as any church in Europe.”
“I think about how interconnected the world is,” Loranc says. “When I’m out on a crisp winter’s morning, shooting a stand of native oaks, I see oak galls hanging from the trees. These were once used to make the pyrogallol chemicals I use to develop my negatives. So the oak trees I am photographing played a part in the developer I use to process my negatives of those trees. It is healthy to remember that we are often linked to the natural world in ways we don’t even suspect.”

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Image Gallery & Bio

About the exhibition
The title Time after Diamonds refers at two series of works I have been working since late 2007 till now. The 8 photographs and the video screening are a selection from the series Offerings and Possessions and The Passage of Time.

Offerings and Possessions conceals about our desire to posses even material things or even people. As it usual in Del Castillo’s works, the reversible action of the reflection appears as looking for ”equilibrium.” In this case, the success of possession depends on the offer by oneself.

The Magpie, a woman completely covered by sea of pearls, a dress made of 12,000 pearls; in the photo a magpie invigilate the reclined woman.

The Anthill, photograph of a woman holding one bronze piece made by Del Castillo, in the shape of the anthill or respectively a human organ. The golden shine is the feeling of desperate desire that reminds us the tale of the Midas king.

The Garden, a woman blinded by a mirrored silver sheet, that reflects the photograph that she holds above her that reveal complicated state between what is shown as artificial and natural flowers, with the hands caught in the act of taking away the flowers while the same time it appear it is taking away body of the woman at the same time.

The Bed, a photograph is the key that links the evolution from the worry about materiality to the worry of eternity.

Del Castillo has built for this photograph, 33 ceramic skulls with golden glazed. Each of the crane shell is removed and filled red velvet cushion, making one bed once you have all of them together. The woman in the photograph is sleeping on top of this bed. As it happened with the ancient tribes that they gain the cranes of their enemies to preserve their powers, this woman sleeps on top of the cranes, that even they are not real ones; they give us the idea of death. She sleeps on top of one Vanitas as if the time doesn’t affect her.

Recorridos, a photograph made of various collages of maps where the artist has resided the last 10 years due to her art practice. One red line links all these places. This red line is actually one sculpture made by her that is one red layered cooper stair that runs around one wooden broom connected to a wooden dustpan.

In transit, a photograph taken directly inside one elevator, where one girl is levitating and the only part that connects her to the floor is her hair that is linked to a sand clock situated on the floor of the elevator.

Matryoshka is a work consists both an installation and a performance, breaking the boundaries between disciplines in art of theatre, visual art and music concerts.

The original idea was directed and created by Naia del Castillo, where she served producer, artistic director for the project and creator for all the visual elements of the piece, photographs, scenery, objects…

In collaboration with vocalist and performer Gunnlaug Thorvaldsdottir, who brought life to Matryoshka through her unique voice and performance.

Matryoshka emerges from an eternal circular movement; expresses life cycle of unstoppable fertility channeled this motion by a large powerful doll while act of defiance expresses in form of shelter, are concealed with half of the body hidden by hairs. Her feet are anchored and frozen however from her ankle to head is unrestraint and free for movement. The layered of different dresses bound her as she slowly releases and undresses like a Matryoshka doll, while the music and voice accompany this transition of unfolding. In a continuous destruction and reconstruction, we trespass the boundaries of concealment, growth, fullness, death and renaissance.

This exhibition is organized as part of the “La noche de Luna Llena festival” with the support of the The Museum of Contemporary Art Esteban Vicente in Segovia and Segovia 2016.

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. The works on exhibition here, produced since 2001, represent an artist who has established a mature, richly eloquent voice. Using digital technology he 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

Visit German Herrera Website

( click here to learn more).

Flowers have to be one of the most photographed subjects imaginable. I mean, how can you not like flowers, right? Everyone with a camera is tempted to take a whack at them. I can recall pointing my brand-new Pentax 35mm SLR at my wife’s day lilies nearly 20 years ago and burning through some rolls. When those K64 slides came back I was underwhelmed by the results. My wife glanced over my shoulder at the light box and muttered, “Maybe you should try birds or something.” Other folks have obviously had more success. In the last two years “brand-name” photographers including Howard Schatz, Barbara Bordnick and Joyce Tenneson have all done books of flower images. Current fashion appears to favor close-ups of huge drooping blossoms, or sepia toned images of dried up and dying blooms. The books do seem to fly off the shelves, so there’s obviously a market for them.

Given the ubiquitious, done-to-death nature of flower photos, it takes some work to do something creative. Scott Peck’s gorgeous series of flowers frozen in ice is one unique effort. Tony Mendoza’s new work, titled simply Flowers, is another. Mendoza is a Cuban-born photographer probably best known for Ernie, a book of photos of the cat he shared a loft with in NYC. Published in 1982, it acquired something of a cult following. The images are genuinely witty, in an Elliott Erwitt sort of way.

Flowers is a new direction for Mendoza. The introduction explains how he began photographing a community garden tended by his wife, finding that the zero incremental cost of digital exposures made it painless to experiment. The resulting book of images has a consistent style and æsthetic that kind of grew on me. I must confess that I find most flower photography saccharine to the point of nausea. Mendoza’s work is different. The flowers are all photographed from ground level—i.e. from below—with relatively short focal lengths. All are lit with flash, most about a half stop to a stop “hotter” than the sky behind them. The resulting images are almost disorienting, sort of a “Land of the Giants” perspective where the occasional passing bumble bee looks the size of a beagle. Some of the flowers are clearly past their prime, others immaculate. The level of well-lit detail demonstrates how bizarre many plants are when you really study them closely.

As a physical object the book is impressive for its dimensions, 12.2 x17.6″. The fifty plates are therefore large enough to have serious impact; the color and detail really hit the eye. Some care has obviously been taken in laying out the images; the color palette and tonality of facing pages harmonize perfectly. The only negative is a quirk of the printing process; the plates demonstrate bronzing when seen at a glare angle, though they look fine under normal illumination. This is a problem familiar to anyone who’s ever tried printing on glossy paper with a pigment inkjet. Mendoza’s witty introduction and afterward add a bit of perspective to the project.

If you love flowers and gardening, this book is worth a look for its unique take on the subject. It may inspire you to dust off your flash and look at your own backyard garden again. It also demonstrates once again the impact of a consistent body of work, perhaps inspiring folks to organize a portfolio of their own. And that’s not a bad thing.

Her work invariably has an air of mystery and ambiguity which is often heightened when subjects are placed in a particular light or landscape.”For me photography has become an ‘act of preservation’ and objects I focus on become the locators or igniters of memory. The traces and remnants we find in any landscape can spark recognition. They can even invoke a presence.”