Vancouver Photographs by Fred Herzog offers a five-decade visual chronicle of urban life in Vancouver, British Columbia. Concentrating mainly on the 1950s and 60s, the project captures the city in transition, observed through the lens of a perceptive and inquisitive émigré.
Vancouver, during Herzog's early years there, was shifting from an industrial port city into a more cosmopolitan urban center. The postwar decades brought redevelopment, cultural flux, and growing urban complexity. Herzog's work emerged against a photographic culture still dominated by black and white, while color was largely relegated to commercial use. His choice to work primarily in color using Kodachrome slide film positioned him at odds with contemporary art photography but enabled him to depict the textures and tones of everyday urban life with striking realism.
Herzog captured the rhythms of street life, focusing on signage, human activity, and the neglected spaces of working-class neighborhoods. His subjects ranged from shopfronts and neon signs to vacant lots, back alleys, and passersby. The work reflects a deep interest in how people inhabit space, what they express through posture and gesture, and how the character of a city is woven through its ordinary places.
For decades, limitations in print technology meant his transparencies could not be adequately reproduced. Only with digital scanning and pigment printing in the early 2000s did his work become widely visible. The 2007 exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery marked a turning point, leading to broader recognition and positioning Herzog as a key influence in color street photography. His retrospective influence is now acknowledged in relation to figures like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, underscoring his role in expanding the language of urban documentary photography.
