SPAIN: EPIPHANIES
Penitants and acolytes, judges and spectators, marching bands and women in Mantilla dress, all inhabit the ritual contexts of Semana Santa and bullfighting in Sevilla, Spain. The photographs of the series Iberian Pageantry look beyond the action of these particular scenes to controlled details that reveal revelry and rootedness in history, as inherited through culture. In a style that echoes early Northern Renaissance and Mannerist paintings, Herzog combines exacting depictions of clothing and costume with a studied abstraction in the portrayal of faces. By presenting these minute details—of jewelry and ornament, textures of silk, velvet and lace—together with abstractions of facial expressions, Herzog celebrates the contradictory and altogether human longings for specificity and dreaming at once.
Iberian Pageantry is one part of Herzog’s trilogy on epiphanies of Spain.
