VANCOUVER.- Equinox Gallery announced the death of Fred Herzog who passed away September 9th, 2019 in Vancouver at the age of 88. He is survived by his daughter Ariane and son Tyson and was predeceased by his wife Christel who passed away in 2013.
Fred Herzog is best known for his street photography which began in 1952 in Canada and continued throughout his life as a daily practice of observing the world around him. While he traveled and made important photographs in almost 40 countries, his adopted homeland of Canada was the place he concentrated his gaze. Herzog’s iconic explorations in colour photography came very early in the artistic development of the medium. As Geoff Dyer wrote in the New York Times, “Herzog is a pioneer who mastered color photography before such a thing respectively existed.”
Herzog’s impressive technical ability to expose very slow speed Kodachrome film was aided in part by his career as a medical photographer. His understanding of the medium combined with, as he put it, “how you see and how you think” created the "right moment" to take the picture. This “right moment” came to Herzog through long hours and thousands of pictures with his Leica where his intuitive visual editing constantly reacted to the street theatre in front of the lens. Timothy Taylor in Canadian Art wrote about his 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. They pass through the field of the lens on routes of their own choosing, enacting an autonomy that (the more Herzog you look at) seems central among the photographer’s observations.”
Fred Herzog had a walking route through Vancouver that enabled him to build friendships with other photographers and neighbourhood residents, giving him an acute understanding of the daily life and soul of Vancouver. David Campany describes Fred Herzog in the book Modern Color, “In recent years, Fred Herzog’s photographs of Vancouver have been welcomed as a 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.”
Fred Herzog’s first major retrospective, Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs, was held at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2007. Subsequent major exhibitions include Fred Herzog: Photographs, C/O Berlin, Germany (2010), Fred Herzog: A Retrospective, Equinox Gallery, Vancouver (2012), Eyes Wide Open! 100 Years of Leica Photography, Haus der Photographie, Hamburg, Germany (2015) and Photography in Canada, 1960-2000, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2017). In 2010 Herzog received a Honourary Doctorate from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and in 2014 he received the Audain Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts. A profile on the artist was featured on the Knowledge Network for the series Snapshot: The Art of Photography II in 2011. In 2014, Fred Herzog’s photograph Bogner’s Grocery (1960) was released as a limited edition stamp as part of Canada Post’s Canadian Photography series.
Herzog has been the subject of several publications including Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs (2007); Fred Herzog: Locations (2009); Fred Herzog: Photographs, C/O Berlin (2010); Fred Herzog: Photographs, Douglas & MacIntyre, 2012; and Fred Herzog: Modern Color, Hatje Cantz (2017).
