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Red Stockings, 1961, by Fred Herzog. 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.
Red Stockings, 1961, by Fred Herzog. 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. Photograph: Equinox Gallery
Red Stockings, 1961, by Fred Herzog. 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. Photograph: Equinox Gallery

Fred Herzog obituary

This article is more than 4 years old

Pioneer of colour photography who acquired almost mythic status in his adopted home city of Vancouver, Canada

Fred Herzog, who has died aged 88, was belatedly acknowledged as a pioneer of colour photography. He was given his first major exhibition in 2007 at the Vancouver Art Gallery, when he was 76.

Many of the images on the walls had been shot more than 50 years before, when, in his spare time, Herzog would roam the city on foot, photographing now vanished shopfronts, streets and working-class neighbourhoods. He wanted, he said years later, to show the “vitality” of his adopted hometown.

Herzog used vibrant Kodachrome slide film at a time when established photographers equated seriousness with the starkness of black and white. It was not until the mid-1970s, when photographers such as William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz were given major American museum shows, that colour began to be reluctantly accepted by the art and photography establishment.

Fred Herzog’s middle-class childhood in Germany was disrupted by the second world war. He emigrated to Canada in 1952. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

By then, and for decades afterwards, Herzog, like his contemporary Saul Leiter, another flaneur with a camera, did not feature in the received history of the medium.

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.

Almost overnight, Herzog went from anonymity to renown, his standing in Vancouver approaching a kind of mythic status particularly among locals who remembered the places and faces he had photographed. “People came to the exhibition and broke into tears,” he later recalled, “because they recognised a city they had forgotten existed.”

He was born Ulrich Herzog in Bad Friedrichshall, near Stuttgart, Germany. His father, also called Ulrich, was an engineer, and his mother, Erna, a housewife with a deep love of literature and art.

Herzog’s middle-class childhood was disrupted by the second world war and, as a young boy, he sheltered from the allied bombs that fell on Stuttgart, killing several of his neighbours. In 1941, his mother died from typhoid and, five years later, his father, who had returned from the war traumatised, also died. Herzog was reluctantly taken in by relatives and worked for a time loading delivery trucks in his grandparents’ hardware supplies warehouse.

Man With Bandage, 1968, by Fred Herzog. The man seems to be hailing an approaching bus, while an elderly woman looks on quizzically, keeping her distance. The image is almost Hitchcockian. Photograph: Equinox Gallery

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.

For three years, Herzog worked as a seaman for Union Steamships, where his fellow crew members nicknamed him Fritz, then Fred. In 1957, he returned to land and to photography, working at St Paul’s hospital, Vancouver, where he visually documented skin diseases and surgery procedures. In 1961, he was given a managerial post at the University of British Columbia and, by the end of the decade, was teaching photography there.

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.

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.

His best known image is also his most unsettling: a man with a bandaged hand seems to be hailing an approaching bus, while an elderly woman looks on quizzically, keeping her distance. Their difference is accentuated in myriad small details: the man squints into the sun, a piece of bloody tissue attached to a shaving cut on his chin; the woman stares straight ahead, holding a pristine pair of white gloves. In its almost sinister dynamic, it could be a still from a B-movie or a Hitchcockian thriller.

Likewise his many images of people staring intently into, or out of, windows. In all his work, the backdrop is a characterful mid-century city, bathed in a luminous natural light that accentuates the deep reds and dark greens of wooden doors and shutters.

Main Barber, 1968, by Fred Herzog. Photograph: Equinox Gallery

In 2001 Herzog was awarded the Audain prize for lifetime achievement in the visual arts. In 2011, a monograph, Fred Herzog: Photographs, was published and, in 2017, the aptly titled Modern Colour followed. He was acknowledged by retrospective exhibitions in Berlin (2010) and Toronto (2011).

In 2012, Herzog caused controversy when, in an interview published in the Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail, he referred to the Holocaust as “the so-called Holocaust”.

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”.

As a photographer, Herzog was undoubtedly ahead of his time, his vision honed by his unhurried wanderings through pre-gentrified Vancouver, his skill evolving free from the dictates of commercial attention or pressure.

“I loved the docks, the airport, the street, the people,” he recalled in the introduction to Modern Colour, comparing himself to a journalist. He was more of an instinctive observer, both detached from, and immersed in, the small human dramas of the city he documented with a painterly eye for stillness, light and, above all, colour.

Herzog’s wife, Christel, died in 2013. He is survived by a daughter, Ariane, and son, Tyson.

Ulrich “Fred” Herzog, photographer, born 21 September 1930; died 9 September 2019

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