When Fred Herzog Saw in Black and White

Fred Herzog was beloved for his photographs of everyday life in an older Vancouver: a rainy city of buzzing neon, the hustle of workers at the port, kids tumbling in dirt yards and the morning quiet of cafés and corner stores.

They were all in colour, a rarity for photographers like Herzog who started out in the 1950s. Using Kodachrome film, he captured details that are all the more nostalgic for us looking back from the lens of the present, from the pastel palette of cars of the day to the red and gold of hand-painted lettering in the windows of barber shops to the patterned dresses of shoppers strolling the downtown.

While Herzog almost exclusively shot in colour from 1957 on, he did not entirely abandon black and white, the preferred medium of his contemporaries.

An exhibit at Vancouver’s Equinox Gallery displays this other side of the master of colour.

We see the same subject matter — the big ads, the pool halls, the Vancouverites out and about — but with more melancholy than in his joyful use of colour.

A book collecting Herzog’s black-and-white pictures was published in 2022, and the questions posed by author Geoff Dyer in the introduction are ones that all fans will be asking:

“If Herzog’s name is synonymous with colour photography, how are these pictures recognizably Herzogian? To what extent is Herzog’s distinctive vision colour-dependent? If colour represented a great leap forward, what do the black-and-white pictures tell us about what is to come? Are these early photographs valuable only in terms of rehearsal and preparation for what is to come, or are they significant works in their own right?”

‘I loved the city for its grittiness’

Herzog was born in 1930 in Bad Friedrichshall, near Stuttgart in southern Germany. Both his parents died in the 1940s, and Stuttgart was heavily bombed during the Second World War. Herzog was left to the mercy of cold relatives, but there was the uncle who gave him a camera, a Zeiss Tessco, that sparked a lifelong passion.

By way of Montreal and Toronto, Herzog arrived in Vancouver in 1952 at the age of 22. It was a city he remembered being attracted to when he came across it in a school textbook: “Gee, there’s a place that has mountains, it’s a nice city, it’s by the sea.”

He worked on ships as a firefighter and an oiler before finding a job as a medical photographer, first at St. Paul’s Hospital, then later in the University of British Columbia’s biomedical communications department.

In his spare time, he made the pictures he would later become known for, approaching his work with what he called the “psychology of the hunter.”

His Kodachrome prints were expensive to develop until the advent of digital scanners and ink-jet printers came along, ushering him and his years of strolls and pictures into the light.

He was in his 70s by the time of his landmark solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2007. The director told him he had become a rock star overnight.

But the show, career milestone though it was, also brought controversy: in a 2012 interview with Marsha Lederman of the Globe and Mail, Herzog initially referred to the “so-called Holocaust.”

“I should not have said that,” he then said. “But what it says, there are some doubts in my mind that the real story is being told.”

Lederman the interviewer stepped in, revealing that her parents were Holocaust survivors, prompting a conversation. “I stand corrected. I stand corrected,” Herzog eventually says.

At the time, the Canadian Jewish News called Herzog’s initial comment “unsettling” and said that he seemed “ill-prepared” to discuss the issue with care or insight.

But the publication did remark on something important documented by Herzog that other admirers failed to take notice of: “Herzog’s work is the best source if you want to see what the Jewish pawn and loan businesses of the postwar era looked like. There is little left of the Jewish downtown storefront culture of Canada’s western cities.”

This is historically significant, alongside the perspective he offers of Black and Chinese life in the Downtown Eastside, Chinatown and Strathcona in postwar decades, years when both groups faced systemic discrimination and found refuge in those neighbourhoods.

Herzog was much more than a hobbyist out on walks with his camera, snapping whatever he saw. Today, we see that he has captured history. But this was always intentional.

“I loved the docks, the airport, the street, the people,” he said in Fred Herzog: Photographs. “I loved the city for its grittiness. I wasn’t a journalist. I did not have the chance to become that. But I photographed like I was a journalist the scene that was Vancouver.”

With the exhibition’s collection of black-and-white images, we see a different side of Herzog’s documentation of a city, now disappeared.

‘Fred Herzog: Black and White’ is on view until Aug. 10 at the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver.