Fred Herzog roamed the streets of Vancouver to create a portrait of his adopted hometown in chance scenarios and spontaneous acts of perception. Today his work is among the most important examples of early color photography. But Herzog did not decide to work almost exclusively with Kodachrome slide color film until the late 1950s. Fred Herzog: Black and White is the first appreciation of a lesser-known facet of the photographer's work. Complementing the landmark publication of Modern Color in 2017, the volume brings together his sumptuous arrangements of light and shadow, and moments of life outside the city. The early black-and-white photographs evoke a sense of melancholy, not nostalgia, showing that the appeal of Herzog's work lies in his flair for condensing a psychological state. Fred Herzog (1930–2019) arrived in Vancouver from Germany in 1953. Professionally employed as a medical photographer, he spent his evenings and weekends photographing the city and its inhabitants in vibrant color. Though he was working prolifically from the 1950s on, Herzog was relatively unknown until a major retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2007 brought his work to a wider public. Digital inkjet printing enabled Herzog to finally make satisfactory prints from his slides and exhibit his important early color street photography.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Text by David Campany, Hans-Michael Koetzle, Jeff Wall.
Fred Herzog is best known for his unusual use of color photography in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when art photography was almost exclusively associated with black-and-white imagery. In this respect, his photographs can be seen as prefiguring the New Color photographers of the 1970s. The Canadian photographer worked largely with Kodachrome slide film for over 50 years, and only in the past decade has technology allowed him to make archival pigment prints that match the exceptional color and intensity of the Kodachrome slide, making this an excellent time to reevaluate and reexamine his work.
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. Fred Herzog is the most comprehensive publication on this important photographer to date.
Fred Herzog (born 1930 in Germany) arrived in Vancouver in 1953. Professionally employed as a medical photographer, he spent his evenings and weekends photographing the city and its inhabitants in vibrant color. Though he has been working prolifically since the 1950s, Herzog was relatively unknown until a major retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2007 brought his work to a wider public. Digital inkjet printing has enabled Herzog to finally satisfactorily make prints from his slides and exhibit his important early color street photography.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Preface by Felix Hoffmann. Text by Claudia Gochmann.
In 1952, Fred Herzog (born 1930) emigrated from Germany to Canada, and quickly found work as a medical photographer in Vancouver. But outside the lab, Herzog also devoted himself to what was, at the time, an unusual and even frowned-upon medium, at least artistically: color photography. Laboring away as a virtually anonymous pioneer in this field, some 20 years before William Eggleston's watershed show at the Museum of Modern Art, Herzog was quietly documenting in rich Kodachrome the streets of Vancouver: its supermarkets, gas stations, bars, urban scenery and above all its working class culture. Herzog used slide film to make his photographs, which limited his ability to exhibit them and further marginalized his work; but in recent decades, happily, this color pioneer has drawn great acclaim, and this volume, the largest Herzog monograph yet published, does marvelous justice to his rich oeuvre.
Fred Herzog: Modern Color
Fred Herzog: Photographs