Fred Herzog: Modern Color

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I learned quite a bit about Herzog including why he photographed what he did and why he wasn't attempting to be 'artful' or capturing the 'decisive moment' or going for posterity. Quite a humble person in terms of his photography -- the photographs in this book and other well-known images of his were taken purely as Herzog the amateur photographer (when he was off work) and not as a professional. The ironic thing is that his profession was as a medical photographer and it wasn't until decades later that his personal photography (that which we all see now) began to be seen, quite by accident. Later in the same interview he attempted to clarify his remarks, saying: “I should not have said that”, while also adding, “... there are some doubts in my mind that the real story is being told.” When the interviewer, Marsha Lederman, herself a child of Holocaust survivors, told her family story, he replied: “I stand corrected. I stand corrected.” Lederman noted that the elderly Herzog seemed “troubled”. Over the next few decades, Herzog spent countless hours walking the city with his camera, shooting thousands of evocative, often painterly, images of mainly working-class neighbourhoods. Like Leiter, he was alert for moments of stillness amid the bustle of the city – two men sharing a joke on a street – and, like Walker Evans, one of his early influences, drawn to the visual poetry of shop signs and storefronts.

I have to work fast and on impulse as I walk around the city with my hand-held 35-mm Leica camera. If you don’t trust your instincts, if you don’t trust your first vision, then you lose it. So when there’s action I start shooting right away. I don’t look long.” Herzog told The Sun in 1994. When his Uncle Kurt died, Herzog inherited his large folding plate camera, which he traded in for a more manageable Kodak Retina, teaching himself photography by shooting portraits of his friends as they hiked in the mountains. When he emigrated to Canada in 1952, he took the camera with him and seems to have started shooting almost as soon as he arrived in Toronto. He was encouraged initially by Ferro Shelley Marincowitz, a medical photographer who became his close friend and mentor, the two sharing a flat and a darkroom for a yearbefore Herzog, aged 22, moved to Vancouver.

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a b c "Archives and Photography Exhibition Review Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs". archivaria.ca. archivaria . Retrieved 9 November 2022. He often shot people from behind, sometimes, as in a photograph of an older woman and a girl waiting on a sidewalk, dramatically cropping the image so that just their lower bodies are visible. It is the colour tones that entrance. In this instance, the deep red of the woman’s pleated dress is echoed in the girl’s tights and shoes.

Die Texte sind informativ, aber nicht gerade inspirierend. Das gelingt dem Fotografen durch sein Werk schon alleine. Vancouver in Kanada ist eine Stadt, die ich auch einmal besucht habe und die ich sehr schätze. Fred Herzogs Fotos sind weder kritisch verurteilend noch verherrlichend.The Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition was nothing short of revelatory, not least because digital printing technology had enabled the rich colour tones of Herzog’s original slides to be faithfully reproduced in luminous prints brimful of telling gestures and period detail. Fred Herzog: Photographs. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011. ISBN 978-1553655589. With essays by Claudia Gochmann, Sarah Milroy, Jeff Wall and Douglas Coupland. Herzog’s images, taken in Canada, do much the same. ‘Content cannot be manufactured, in my opinion,’ Herzog says. ‘That which I can find is better than that which you can make. That which we find, the work and the use of the people out there, it’s natural, that’s what ordinary people do, that interests me.’