Home
Exhibitions
About Us
Contact
Appointments
Framing
Pickup & Delivery
Art Sales
Employment
Links
© Chernoff Fine Art 2008
www.chernofffineart.com
Still Lingers: The African Photographs of Christel Herzog
January 2009 - February 2009
Life is funny – a childhood curiosity about a far away place called Timbuktu turned into an obsession to go there and see it for myself, but not without first learning about Africa. And the more I read, about the history, the customs, the religions, the way of life of its people, the more I became interested in the continent.
I went to West Africa at a time when it was fairly quiet there, and when I traveled through Sierra Leone, where people worked hard but appeared happy enough, I could not have imagined the civil war that would break out there a few years later. I am asking myself: how could it happen – and if it could happen there, could it happen here?
I grew up in Germany and came to Canada in 1966. I had always liked to travel, and when my children were both in school, I started making extended trips, always going alone. It is never easy not to be noticed as a tourist in an exotic locale, but it is easier to blend in as a single traveler. It also gives me a chance to get into conversations with local people, travel the way they do, eat the food they eat, and learn to appreciate the difficulties they face every day. Although I am not a photographer and I took the photographs originally mostly to keep the memories of my trip fresh in my mind, and to show my family where I went and how life there was both different, but also similar to our own, I now think that maybe it is useful to show the 'other' life in Africa, beside the one we see on television.
Christel Herzog
December 2008
Life is indeed - funny, I was born in Brooklyn, NY, USA in 1966. As a person of colour Africa never seemed further away than the colour of my skin. The constant mass media references placed me in a part of the world I had no understanding of and in some respect wanted to distance myself from. I was constantly bombarded with images of poverty and despair. This past spring 2008 I exhibited a body of artwork dealing with this strange mediated experience entitled Learning to Walk a Mediated Journey to Africa. In looking for and presenting all things African, I discovered the work of Christel Herzog. More than anything I connected both to these images of the everyday not as real but as human. It is this aspect of the person (Herzog) and the photographs that made me realize that we all have to recognize our common heritage. When we do, we will recognize the diversity, strength and uniqueness that is AFRICA.
Sean George,
January, 2009
