Fred Herzog immigrated to Canada from Germany in 1952 and began documenting the Vancouver cityscape a year later.While he worked as a medical photographer for most of his professional life, outside of this he wandered the streets shooting a hundred rolls of film every year. Herzog favoured the working-class neighbourhoods and downtown city core—areas that were in complete contrast to the ordered cities of Germany. His passion for photography resulted in a large body of work depicting Vancouver during the postwar era, at a time when capitalism and consumer culture were burgeoning.

Herzog viewed the streetscape as a stage set overflowing with drama; he was both a narrator looking from outside and an actor performing from within. His subjects were mostly photographed unaware, as he sought out unusual scenes and spontaneous gestures. From the crowds in the streets to the shadowy corners of flâneurs, the city was a recurring subject within his photographic investigation of North American ideals. For Herzog, the visual extravaganza of advertising that filled Vancouver–brightly lit neon, hand-painted, embossed, and commercial signs–was an important pictorial and cultural aspect of this environment. The signs’ discordant clashes of colour and text were evidence of the city’s pulsing energy, a manifestation of its extreme contrasts. He documented eccentric window displays and second-hand shops that were teeming with outmoded objects, which he described as “icons of our culture.”

Photographs of the automobile, a quintessential symbol of postwar life, repeatedly appear throughout Herzog’s work; a signifier of status offering the promise of mobility, yet also an object of excess destined for the junk heap. As much as this new world–replete with its billboard lures of success and glamour–was celebrated, a tension underlies his choice of subject matter. Herzog both revels in and critiques North American culture, blurring distinctions between the city’s effervescence and its overindulgence. While he was not familiar with Marshall McLuhan until 1964, Herzog embarked upon a similar investigation, which began in 1957. They shared a common interest in the figure/ground relationship that shaped urban environments, evident in Herzog’s documentation of the city and the cultural transformation that resulted from the emergence of new technologies.

Herzog captured the vitality of everyday life in the brilliant colour of Kodachrome slide film. For most of his career he rarely exhibited these street photographs. His work is now acknowledged as pioneering–an early example of how colour could be used as an expressive device within photography. Uncommon within artistic practices of the 50s and 60s, his approach to colour borrowed from the language of advertising. Only through the new technology of inkjet printing did he feel satisfied that the vibrancy of his slides could be matched by prints. While these images venerate the past, they also bring forth new meanings. Just when we thought we knew the city, Herzog’s images reveal what he describes as “a cycle of hitherto unseen phenomena” that formed “shadows” on his film.1

Curated by Andrea Kunard and Bonnie Rubenstein