Fred Herzog

Fred Herzog has been on my list of artists to feature here since I started Focus a year ago. Now, as a retrospective of his work recently opened at the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver, this feels like the right moment to express my love for this particular combo of nostalgia and street photography.

His picture of a pink umbrella first drew me in. A couple crossing the street — in Vancouver’s Granville Street, as I learned later — under a luminescent umbrella. The umbrella and the two figures are mirrored in signage on the building corner: pink and with two silhouettes. To top it off, the man is looking back at the camera. I had to know who took this image. 

 Fred Herzog, born Ulrich Herzog, in Stuttgart, Germany, immigrated to Canada as a young man and settled in Vancouver in 1953. He worked almost exclusively with Kodachrome slide film — the film that produces deliciously vibrant colors, as favored by William Eggleston, Harry Gruyaert and others. He supported himself by working as a medical photographer. He also worked as an instructor in the fine arts departments of two universities in British Columbia. But roaming the streets of Vancouver is where he found his magic. He amassed a huge body of work printing a portion of it himself in the early 2000s, when technology made printing possible in the chromatic intensity he had sought. Still, at the time of his death in 2019, at 88, there were some hundred thousand unseen slides.

Barber shops with their graphic, brightly colored striped signage were subjects he loved exploring, as were sidewalks, storefronts, and people. The book Fred Herzog: Modern Color, with a foreword by David Campany, is the closest most of us will get to walking those streets with him.