Fred Herzog / 31.9.1930-9.9.2019
A self-taught photographer, Fred Herzog emigrated from Germany to Canada in 1952, having started to take outdoor photographs at home in Germany during his early 20s. He would soon relocate to Vancouver, the city that would become his permanent home and primary subject for much of his career. Over the next several decades he would find inspiration in the people of the streets of Vancouver, capturing almost solely candid subjects going about their lives downtown. As he developed his style and documented the passing years’ transformation of Vancouver, he supported himself as a medical photographer and rarely exhibited his work before the 90s.
Notable in Herzog’s style is his choice of colour film, something that was more than uncommon amongst “serious” photographers at the time. His avoidance of black and white to capture this ageing urban environment imbues Herzog’s subjects with a vibrant, tangible essence that gives life to the nostalgia his pictures evoke rather than a bleakness. This colourful visual of often sparsely populated city spots have a similar quality to American painter Edward Hopper, most evidently in the iconic Nighthawks. It simultaneously feels lonesome and far gone, but endlessly human and real, and not without a sort of joie de vivre. Herzog’s eye picked out the small beauties of the bustling B.C. metropolis and he chose to immortalize these memories without the sepia overlay of passing time.
Fred Herzog hunted after the vibrancy of an urban environment rapidly changing in the mid-20th-century. Its peoples, its architecture, its scenes, its character. Herzog’s life was a documentation of time passing by in such a way that the moments documented could still be felt. The memories preserved in each of his shots have life in them and say more to the truth of those lived moments than a stoic, colourless print. Through the prolific career of Fred Herzog, Vancouver has an invaluable document of its transformation, and the memories of colours long since faded.
© FRED HERZOG
