Fred Herzog (photo by Robert Keziere)
Renowned photographer Fred Herzog died in Vancouver on Monday. He was 88.
Herzog is best known for his street photography, which he began in 1952 and continued throughout his life as a daily practice of observing the world around him. He took thousands of pictures with his Leica, where his intuitive visual editing reacted to the street theatre in front of his lens.
His iconic explorations in colour photography came early in the artistic development of the medium. As Geoff Dyer wrote in the New York Times: “Herzog is a pioneer who mastered colour photography before such a thing respectively existed.”
Herzog’s impressive technical ability was aided in part by his career as a medical photographer.
Timothy Taylor wrote in Canadian Art wrote about Herzog's brilliance as a street photographer: “Above all else, a typical Herzog photo lacks artifice. Herzog, in search of a truthfulness, a momentary, telling realness, does not intrude much from his side of the camera … Herzog’s work captures subjects prior to the possibility of a pose. They are caught in action.”
Herzog had a walking route through Vancouver that let him build friendships with other photographers and local residents, giving him an acute understanding of the city.
In the book, Modern Color, David Campany describes Herzog's great gift. "For over half a century he has observed the grain of that city as it lived, worked, played, and changed. He surveyed the streets, alleyways, storefronts, signs, empty lots, backyards, the waterfront, and the people. 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.”
Herzog’s first major retrospective, Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs, was at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2007. Subsequent major exhibitions include Fred Herzog: Photographs, at C/O in Berlin in 2010; and Fred Herzog: A Retrospective, at Equinox Gallery in Vancouver in 2012. He was included in Photography in Canada, 1960-2000 at the National Gallery of Canada in 2017.
In 2010, Herzog received a honorary doctorate from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and, in 2014, he received the Audain Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts. A profile of Herzog was featured in the Knowledge Network series, Snapshot: The Art of Photography II in 2011. In 2014, one of his photographs was released as a limited-edition stamp as part of Canada Post’s Canadian photography series.
Herzog is survived by his daughter, Ariane, and son, Tyson, and was predeceased by his wife, Christel, who died in 2013.
Source: Equinox Gallery
