Gallery Talks
Francisca Rivero-Lake Cortina and Carla Verea Hernández
Paparazza Moderna: Lovers and Frenemies, 1922–1967 / 2011–2025
Lake Verea is a queer artist duo formed in 2005, consisting of Francisca Rivero-Lake Cortina (born 1973) and Carla Verea Hernández (born 1978), both from Mexico City. Their artistic collaborative practice focuses on expanded photography, integrating various media such as installation, textiles, performance, and video. Through this hybrid approach, Lake Verea experiments with photographic techniques and formats to create intimate and personal portraits, often questioning authorship and exploring themes of memory, portraiture, modern architecture, and the exploration of artists’ archives.
Working across both analog and digital platforms—from 19th-century cameras to iPhones—they select their tools in response to each project’s demands. Frequently, they photograph simultaneously using two cameras, exchanging them mid-session to dissolve individual authorship and emphasize their identity as a duo. In some bodies of work, they inhabit personas during research and shooting, generating alternate narratives that subvert linear or canonical histories. At the heart of their work is a search for intimacy and storytelling—a commitment to seeing differently, to revealing overlooked details and proposing personal counter-histories through image-making.
In 2019, Lake Verea presented Uno a Uno Bellas Artes, an exhibition and artist book that explored the iconic Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. The series featured one-to-one scale reproductions of architectural fragments, installed within the Museum of the Palace. Three pieces from this series were acquired by the Committee on Photography Fund of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and will be featured in the upcoming New Photography 2025 exhibition.