Lena Herzog

Lena Herzog (born Elena Pisetski in 1970 in Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains) is a Russian American documentary and fine art photographer.
Herzog moved to Leningrad in 1987 to attend the Philological Faculty of Leningrad University, where she studied languages (English and Spanish) 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. She 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. Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pasadena Museum of California Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), and the International Center of Photography (New York).
She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, German filmmaker Werner Herzog. They have collaborated on some projects including a book of stills from her husband’s film Bad Lieutenant which was published by Rizzoli in 2009. Werner Herzog wrote the introduction to Lena Herzog’s book Pilgrims, which was released in 2002.