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Species

Lucia Herrero

Published on 30/11/11

© Lucia Herrero

SPECIES, is a soci­olo­gical study where real­ity and fantasy get mixed. These images are the pages of a “Cata­logue of Spe­cies from the Albufera Nat­ural park” Not animal or vegetal spe­cies, but human ones.
I por­trayed what I con­sider to be every rep­res­ent­at­ive group of that land. They all have some­thing in com­mon: They are inhab­it­ants of this micro­cli­mate formed by water. Each group relates with this land in a par­tic­u­lar way: pro­tect­ing it, passing by, get­ting fed by it, exploit­ing it or simply giv­ing to it their unearthly beauty as a present.
They float on the water. The land­scape acts as magic back­ground: They belong to it and it belongs to them. The people is really there, stand­ing on plastic boxes. No Pho­toshop tricks at all.
This series is the res­ult of a trip to a place I didn’t know in advance. I con­vinced the dif­fer­ent groups and indi­vidu­als to par­ti­cip­ate in this sur­real­ist por­trait­ure adven­ture. The final images are as import­ant as the pro­cess –the mak­ing of. What interests me more from this pro­ject is “the pho­to­graphy as an event”. The story behind: Mak­ing groups of unknown people to pose, being them­selves, stand­ing on the water, makes the whole pro­cess a per­form­ance.
 (Lucia Herrero)

© Lucia Herrero

The final res­ult are images which style is marked between social doc­u­ment (por­trait of the rural Spain) and a social exper­i­ment / artistic per­form­ance pro­cess. Spe­cies rep­res­en­ted in this cata­log are: The rice field work­ers, the unem­ployed men who spend their time fish­ing, the beauty queen, the fisher women, the old ladies, the fire­men, the guards, the waiters, the grand­mas house­wives, the bikers, the heavy metal local group, the boat man, a young boy from the vil­lage…
I develop in pho­to­graphy what I call “Antro­po­lo­gía Fantástica”. I por­trait in a doc­u­ment­ary and the­at­rical style, people or groups with fantasy and dra­matic ele­ments. It is a photo-event in which the act­ors inter­pret themselves.

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