Fred Herzog

Elysium Cleaners

1958

Fred Herzog was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1930 and emigrated to Vancouver in 1952. There, he worked as a medical photographer by day and on evenings and weekends he took to the streets with his camera, documenting daily life as he observed it. Focusing his camera on storefronts, neon signs, billboards, cafes and crowds of people, he eloquently depicted the architecture of the street as a framework for human interaction, presenting a view of the city that is both critical and elegiac. Herzog’s work in color was unusual in the 1950s and 1960s, when most fine art photographers were working only with black and white imagery. His use of Kodachrome color slide film, however, limited his ability to make exhibition-quality prints. In recent years, newer digital inkjet printing processes have finally enabled his work to get print and exhibit the important bodies of early street photography. In addition to the Vancouver Art Gallery, Herzog’s work has also been represented in one-person shows at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary; the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto; the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; the C/O Berlin Foundation in Berlin and the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris. Most recently, he was included in the expansive exhibition “Eyes Wide Open: 100 Years of Leica Photography” at the Haus der Photographie/Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. His photographs are in the collections of many Canadian museums, as well as in many major corporate or private collections, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Pier 24 (San Francisco) and the Martin Margulies collection (Miami).