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Fred Herzog
67 Alexander Street, 1967
Inkjet print
Image dimensions 45 x 29.5 cm
Image courtesy the artist and Equinox Galllery, Vancouver
ESTIMATE $2,500 - $3,500
The photographs offered here by local photographer Fred Herzog are key images in his remarkable document of Vancouver. Since arriving here from Germany in 1953, he has methodically photographed the street life, storefronts and buildings of Vancouver, producing a comprehensive document of a city through a half-century of growth. Drawn to places in transition, Herzog’s images reveal the vitality and elegiac quality of neglected areas. His photographs have been shown across Canada, including the National Gallery of Canada, in several PHG exhibitions, and most recently in a major survey exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. As the success of his VAG exhibition proves, Herzog is clearly now appreciated as a significant figure in the history of Vancouver photography.
Influenced as much by literature as photographs like The Americans by Robert Frank, Herzog has self-consciously drawn upon documentary traditions while incorporating something of an outsider's idiosyncratic sensitivity. Within his images, bodily gesture, the detritus of consumer culture and the architecture of the street take on a heightened resonance, as the impact of modernity becomes visible in the everyday life of the city. As Grant Arnold notes, “in the tradition of the flâneur, Herzog positions himself as a narrator outside the depicted action, a figure of whom only the viewer/reader is aware. His views of Vancouver’s downtown streets, their evening crowds energized by the vibrant electricity of neon light, carry the viewer through public space as an empathetic part of the crowd.”
Much of Herzog's work was shot on Kodachrome, a colour slide film that was difficult to use spontaneously, and his bold use of colour was unusual in the 1950s and 60s, a time when art photography was almost exclusively associated with black and white imagery. In this respect, his photographs can be seen as a precursor to the "New Colour Photography" of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, who were to receive widespread acclaim in the 1970s. With digital photography, Herzog has been able to replicate the tonal range and contrast of slides. His rarer black and white images, such as Hastings and Carrall, typically are more expressive. Herzog continues to record the rapidly-changing urban landscape of Vancouver through a poetic perspective. As he has said: “When you have seen the city to the point where you think you’ve done it all, the horizon will suddenly sustain a crack and a new cycle of hitherto unseen phenomena will begin to form shadows on your film.”
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