Fred Herzog, colourful street photographer
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
Fred Herzog arrived in Vancouver in 1953. The young German immigrant was fascinated by all aspects of Canadian life, and set out to document it with his camera.
Herzog saw art in almost everything: a family sitting outside on a summer’s day, a Volkswagen Beetle turning the corner in the rain, a wall of photos of men’s hairstyles in a Main Street barber shop. He shot billboards, second-hand stores and store window displays, neon signs, the working waterfront and people.
Herzog’s 1958 photo of the crowded, colourful street scene at Hastings Street and Columbia is probably the best photo ever taken of the Hastings strip in its prime. His 1958 shot of the neon jungle at Hastings and Columbia at night is the premier illustration of the days when Vancouver was a neon mecca.
His 1961 photo of gamblers playing the Crown and Anchor game at the Pacific National Exhibition is a marvel, capturing the wide-eyed, open-mouthed look of expectancy on a woman’s face as the gambling wheel comes to a stop.
“Fred has a really kind of uncanny ability to render bodily gesture,” says Grant Arnold of the Vancouver Art Gallery. “He has a real amazing sensibility for that. So much of the meaning of his photographs is conveyed through bodily gesture and the positioning of the body.”
Herzog also had the vision, and courage, to shoot in colour, when virtually all serious art photography was in black and white. The National Gallery in Ottawa actually turned down Herzog’s photographs when he tried to donate them in the 1980s.
“They said ‘Sorry, we only do black and white,’ ” Herzog said.
But eventually the world caught on. A Herzog retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2007 was a smash hit, and launched him as an international star.
In the decade since the VAG show, Herzog has had acclaimed exhibitions in New York, Berlin, London and Paris, published several books, and even had his 1960 photo Bogner’s Grocery immortalized on a Canadian stamp.
Success came late in life for Herzog, who was born in Stuttgart, Germany on Sept. 21, 1930. After immigrating to Vancouver, he made his living as a medical photographer at UBC, taking street photographs in his spare time.
His subject matter was varied, but he had a strong sense of what he was looking for: real life.
“I was trying to show vitality,” he said in 2005. “The pictures are about content. And if there is no content, take no picture. Content cannot be manufactured, in my opinion. That which I can find is better than that which you can make.”