Ana Lourdes Herrera "Lou Peralta" photographic background

She is the fourth generation in a family of portrait photographers of the Legendary HERRERA Studio in Mexico.  Her great-grandfather started working in Josafat’s portrait studio in 1898 in Puebla, Mexico, and since then, for more than 100 years, her relatives portrayed their subjects with a talent and a unique style to approach people and bring to light their souls and their feelings.  This made them have a quality of “indispensable” among popular figures, thanks to the news media, while at the same time becoming the keepers of stories for countless families in Mexico.

Although her artistic practice is essentially different from the commercial practice which was handed down to her, her approach to portraiture as a contemporary photographer is profoundly inspired by them and their work. 

She worked for more than 30 years in professional photography under her official name, Ana Lourdes Herrera Peralta, using that technique. For the past eight years, however, she has reinvented herself, expanding the limits of the two-dimensional photographic image and reimagining portraiture as a sculptural and spatial experience under her new artistic name, Lou Peralta.