CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/16/2020

Fred Herzog: Modern Color is Back in Stock!

Fred Herzog left Germany as a young man in 1952. His mother had died in 1941; his father died right after the war. He worked odd jobs in Toronto before moving to Vancouver to be a medical photographer at St. Paul's Hospital. There, he began to shoot with a Leica 35mm camera, the better to capture the "engagingly seedy and colorful" city that would become his subject for the rest of his life. "He surveyed the streets, alleyways, storefronts, signs, empty lots, backyards, the waterfront, and the people," David Campany writes. "It is not the 'positive view' preferred by civic officials; neither is it negative. It is the measured, attentive, and ultimately generous view of a mindful observer. Few other bodies of photography in the history of the medium have come close to the richness of Herzog's extended city portrait."