Fred Herzog: Modern Color

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However, technology only allowed him to make archival pigment prints that match the color and intensity of the Kodachrome slide in the past decade. The young German immigrant was fascinated by all aspects of Canadian life and set out to document it with his camera. Fred Herzog, as we said, is known for his unusual use of color in the fifties and sixties, a time when art photography was almost exclusively associated with black and white imagery.

In his work, we’re shown a world we recognise, anachronistic as some of it may be, yet we relate to it. Fred Herzog is known for his unusual use of colour in the fifties and sixties, a time when art photography was almost exclusively associated with black and white imagery. A while later, Herzog worked as a medical photographer and also became a serious documentary photographer.Despite slight shifts in social, cultural and technological parameters, the world now looks much the same as it did in the ’60s and ’70s. Professionally employed as a medical photographer, he spent his evenings and weekends photographing the city and its inhabitants in vibrant color.

This book brings together over 230 images, many never before reproduced, and features essays by acclaimed authors David Campany, Hans-Michael Koetzle and artist Jeff Wall. For more than 50 years, the Canadian photographer worked almost exclusively with Kodachrome slide film, and it is only in the past decade that technological advances have enabled him to produce archival pigment prints that match the extraordinary color and intensity of Kodachrome slides. That which we find, the work and the use of the people out there, it’s natural, that’s what ordinary people do, that interests me. They come from that process of walking and that intuitive, deductive reasoning of where to be and how to take a picture when you’re there,” said Andy Sylvester, owner of the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver. Take a stroll through Herzog’s streets and you find a place awash with neon signs, Coca-Cola adverts, yellow light against thick shadow, vintage cars, billboards and the rest.

Those images, taken through a camera that possessed only a primitive peephole viewfinder, were lost some years later as Herzog travelled to Canada on a rust-bucket ship that apparently nearly sank. Herzog started taking pictures in Germany in 1950 where, as part of a youth group who every summer went hiking in the Alps, he was given a Kodak Retina I camera. Herzog also had the vision, and courage, to shoot in color when virtually all serious art photography was in black and white.