Armando Herrera was one of the great masters of black and white and this Collective Memory is a tribute to his work and career.
The great Legacy of Armando Herrera’s art is his Archive.
The value of this important collection is that it treasures the secrets and talents, the joy, and the drama, the delights and the inspiration of the artists, that made the Golden Age the most beloved and nostalgic era of modern Mexico.
It is truly a unique testimony of such glorious era and an important historical/documentary
legacy of this country.

The archive of Armando Herrera is an exceptional collection containing:

 More than 9000 images taken in black and white negatives, in 8×10”, 5×7” formats. These are selected portraits of 860 different artists and are preserved in excellent conditions.
1432 Solio prints. This is a unique and extremely rare collection because of the inherent essence of the Solio paper. Which will black out and loose the image if exposed to sunlight. It can only be viewed under dim artificial light.
1900 original prints of different sizes, made during the years of operation of the studio and personally printed by Armando Herrera in his darkroom. These prints have an important museographic and artistic value.
Finally, the original cameras, lenses, lighting equipment, darkroom gear, accessories and parafernalia usedduring his years of activity.
All of this equipment can be used not only as museum exhibition pieces, but to fully recreate the original aspect and conditions of his famous and successful studio in Mexico City.

To date, most of the negatives have been scanned and converted into digital files. They were digitalized and processed by his son, Master Photographer Hector Herrera, to maintain the authentic darkroom procedures that were in vogue at the time. For example, fabulous lighting techniques are particularly emphasized, as well as metal scraping and pencil modeling and retouching that were done directly on the surface of the negatives by experimented draftsmen and illustrators. This is the reason why it has been possible to maintain the impressive quality of the original portraits.

Both archives, analog and digital, have been organized and catalogued with unique names and have been classified in 17 different genre categories.
Besides, a database has been created with search-words in English and Spanish. Furthermore, a classification, identification, codification and homologation system has been implemented throughout all of the different types of formats (negatives, digital, prints and solios), which allows every single image to be matched with its counterpart. This is extremely useful for investigation, evaluation, search, diffusion, and commercialization purposes.It is fully operational.

All of this preservation, conservation and organization process has taken 20 years to complete.
Armando’s images transcended frontiers and were visual references of many of those movie celebrities in all of the Spanish-speaking nations and countries such as the United States, Japan, Italy, France, Yugoslavia and many others.
The work of Armando Herrera had a very important popular meaning. No other Mexican photographer has had the scope and magnitude that Armando achieved with his creations at a massive level. Basically, because the Mexico of that time, forged great personalities in this artistic field, in quantities that have never been repeated again.