Old women, rock stars and waiters can all walk on water in Lucia Herrero's photo series Species. It's not a Photoshop trick, but an elaborate portrait setup where she has her subjects stand on submerged fruit crates. All the photos were taken on Spain's largest lake, located in the Albufera Natural Park.
The surreal effect is something Herrero, a Spanish photographer, calls "Antropología Fantástica,” or fantastical anthropology. By exaggerating fantastical elements in her photos, she hopes to cut through today's visual clutter and get to a deeper truth about people.
"For me it's a way to give more reality to the real," she says. "We are tired of seeing the real. Photography has developed so far that we don’t get surprised by anything anymore. You have to serve the dish in a different way so you can taste the same ingredients."
Like her earlier photo series called Tribes (also covered by Wired), the light in Species is an important part of the Antropología Fantástica. Herrero always shoots into the sun and then lights the subjects with a 1000 watt flash because it takes a “banal situation and [elevates] it to a state of exception.” It makes the pictures stand out in a fantastical way.
The photo series is called Species because Herrero's subjects are all locals to the lake in the photos. They are the human species of that area. Several restaurants in the area are known for their paella, so she photographed local waiters. The lake attracts a lot of waterfowl so she photographed duck hunters. There's a portrait of a woman in a traditional dress who was the local beauty queen from one of the nearby towns. Even the metal band are all locals.
Along with the portraits Herrero also took several behind-the-scenes photos, which she says are just as important since she views her portraits as performances. She wanted people to understand what it took to make pictures out in the middle of a lake.
Most of her subjects just waded through the shallow water and then climbed on the crates when they were in place. If the crates weren't tall enough she'd add pieces of wood for the subject to stand on. For the older women, she built an entire path of boards out to the portrait spot so they didn't get too wet or stuck in the mud. Not many people took convincing.
"They were all immediately up for it," she says.
