‘Of Time and Place: the photography of Fred Herzog’
Fred Herzog: Modern Color, Hatje Cantz, 2016
An essay on the work of the Vancouver photographer Fred Herzog, commissioned for the book Fred Herzog: Modern Color, Hatje Cantz, 2016
Text in German / English, 320 pp., 230 ills., 26.50 x 26.50 cm, hardcover
ISBN 978-3-7757-4181-1
Of Time and Place
David Campany
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 was born Ulrich Herzog in 1930, in Bad Friedrichshall, southern Germany, near the city of Stuttgart. He did not do so well at school, but pictures fascinated him and he remembers seeing a photograph of Vancouver’s industrial harbor in a school textbook. His mother died in 1941. By 1945, Stuttgart had been flattened by Allied bombing. His father died within a year of returning from the war. The young Ulrich worked in a hardware store and took up photography. He saw the beginning of the new Stuttgart emerge, its architecture and citizens severed from the deep past of their city’s history, and silenced by Germany’s recent behavior.
In 1952, Herzog left Germany, taking a ship to Montreal and then a train to Toronto. There he had various jobs. He continued to take pictures, setting up a darkroom with a friend, who taught him some of the specialized techniques of medical photography. By May 1953, he was in Vancouver and soon found employment on a cargo ship. His fellow workers were international, with various experiences of the upheavals of the war. Colleagues called him “Fritz,” which soon became “Fred.” He befriended a fellow German named Gerhard Blume, an autodidact who introduced Herzog to a wide range of ideas from literature, philosophy, politics, economics, religion, and science. At the same time, Herzog was hungry for photography magazines and annuals. From these he informed himself of the latest technical and aesthetic developments.
When he was not on the ship, Herzog was exploring British Columbia on his motorcycle. Then, in 1957, he took a job as a medical photographer at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver. This tethered him to the city, and to a very applied kind of photography. Finding Vancouver to be “engagingly seedy and colorful,” he now began to photograph it with a new Leica 35mm camera. His early pictures of the windows of secondhand stores and bookshops were steps toward the approach that would soon come to characterize his work.
An avid reader, Herzog was drawn to what he later called the “brittle literary objectivity” of Gustave Flaubert’s prose, particularly Madame Bovary (1856); and to John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925), a kaleidoscopic novel overflowing with vivid character sketches and powerful vignettes of the social and economic churn of modern life. He wondered if there could be a photographic equivalent to this. In his spare time, he began to frequent the downtown area near Dunsmuir, Hastings, Robson, and Pender Streets, but also Chinatown and what came to be known as the Downtown Eastside. This was to be his calling—exploring, often revisiting the same places, feeling his way under the skin of the city.
Vancouver had its demure and rather genteel districts, of course, but these were not for Herzog. He felt that the “new, clean, safe and honest neighborhoods do not give rise to interesting pictures. The thing that street photographers hope to discover has to do with the disorderly vitality of the street; the street people on the corners and plazas, in billiard parlours, pubs and stores, where shoppers, voyeurs and loiterers feel at home.”1 Unpredictable and full of chance, such places and people offer rich pickings for the alert observer with a camera.
But the reasoning was more than photographic. To understand a society one must work from the ground up, and the sidewalk can be a good place to start. As Jane Jacobs put it, sidewalk life is “composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance . . . an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.”2 These words are from The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs’s influential defense of the rights urban dwellers’ to a city that grows organically around them, from the street. This kind of city, and citizen, were under threat from the twin forces of top-down city planning and corporate opportunism. In Stuttgart, Herzog had already seen something of that.
His images were in color. This was long before color photography came to be regarded as a serious medium, either for documentary work or art photography. As Herzog himself later mocked: “Just as we know that liberty and fresh caught salmon are good, we knew then that colour was to be used only for pretty sights. Landscapes, swans, flowers, sunsets, gnarled trees and burning candles were okay. Everything else raided eyebrows.”3 Introduced in 1935, Kodachrome was a very fine-grained and tonally rich positive transparency film. It was produced for the amateur market and the home slide show. But it was also good for capturing the things that interested Herzog: variations in fabric and skin, the palette of postwar consumables, bright glossy paintwork as it weathers into muted hues, the subtleties of urban wood and stone, and the atmospheric variations of a coastal climate.4 Kodachrome was not very sensitive to light and thus required relatively slow shutter speeds, but this, too, suited Herzog’s purposes. He preferred slow observation away from the “decisive moments” found in newspapers and illustrated magazines. With good technique he could hold his camera steady enough to make even half-second exposures in the neon glow of the nightlife on Granville Street.
While Herzog shot and printed a great deal of very fine black and white work, Kodachrome required no darkroom activity. Each exposed film would be sent off for processing and returned as a little yellow box of thirty-six mounted slides. Only a projector was needed. Keeping the technical aspect to a minimum allowed him to spend much of his available free time out in the world—wandering, thinking, noticing. With great consistency he averaged two films a week. That amounts to well over 100,000 exposures. For twenty-nine years (1961 to 1990), Herzog made these photographs around the edges of his family life and a full-time job heading the Photo/Cine Division of the Department of Biomedical Communications at the University of British Columbia (UBC).
The practicalities of observational photography with a 35mm camera could hardly be simpler. All that is required is a sound understanding of apertures, shutter speeds, film speeds, and the viewfinder. What really matters is a feel for subject matter, and a pictorial sensibility that will convert it into meaningful images. This is an inexact matter, to say the least, but it is clear that Herzog is a realist committed to the gentle mastery of naturalistic framing and timing. There is nothing forced in his work. The results seem almost effortless. Looking at his photographs is easy and welcoming, and that is the point.
Herzog has many ways of achieving this. For example, the confident and classical observation we see in Howe and Nelson (1960) entirely suits the subject matter—a new skyscraper rising through the horizon line of older low-rise homes and shops. With its almost textbook “rule of thirds” composition, it is a satisfyingly humble picture and a lucid document of change. Man with Bandage (1968) clearly required Herzog to make his physical presence as undemonstrative as his camera, and the picture is as accomplished as any in the history of street photography. With its unforced proportions and attention to human settlement, Fraser River Landscape (1961) shows the topographic eye of a survey photographer, or nineteenth-century landscape painter. Fire, English Bay (1981) would no doubt have failed as newspaper reportage, but its disarmingly relaxed manner makes for a more lasting impression of the event, and of the crowd that had gathered to watch. While these photographs are all very different, they share the same sense of humility, order, and clarity of purpose.
In 1959, Herzog came across Robert Frank’s new book of photographs, The Americans. While he had little of Frank’s bitterness or feeling of dispossession, he was impressed by the apparent ease with which Frank photographed in the flow, closing the gap between daily experience and picture-making, as if living and photographing were inseparable. It clearly struck a chord with Herzog’s own approach, which was by this point well established. Then, in 1962, he was introduced to the work of Walker Evans and immediately felt a close affinity with it. Herzog later wrote: “The breadth of [Evans’s] vision is only rivaled by the precision with which he nails content and deep meaning.”5 What Herzog recognized in Evans, and what many people continue to recognize in him, was not a style or even an aesthetic, but a disposition. Although Evans’s photographs expressed this disposition consummately, it was not his invention, for just as Herzog felt affirmed by Evans’s photographs, Evans had been affirmed by encounters with the work of his forebears, Eugène Atget and Mathew Brady. There is no satisfactory name or definition for this approach. Evans sometimes called it the “documentary style” and sometimes “lyric documentary,” akin to lyric poetry. In 1969, he described it thus:
[T]he seasoned serious photographer knows that his work can and must contain four basic qualities—basic to the special medium of camera, lens, chemical and paper: (1) absolute fidelity to the medium itself; that is, full and frank and pure utilization of the camera as the great, the incredible instrument of symbolic actuality that it is; (2) complete realization of natural, uncontrived lighting; (3) rightness of in-camera view-finding, or framing (the operator’s correct, and crucial definition of his picture borders); (4) general but unobtrusive technical mastery.6
What is expressed here is the importance of photographic restraint, never imposing or overstepping the mark, deferring to the subject matter and taking one’s aesthetic lead from it. However, it is only effective if the subject matter is similarly restrained: commonplace buildings, commonplace citizens, commonplace objects, commonplace scenes (photography may render this subject matter beautiful, or strange, or even transcendent, but it is rooted in the everyday and anonymous). This type of camera observation can produce disarmingly open images of exceptional power and longevity. John Szarkowski, the former head of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, noted of Evans’s work:
It is difficult to know now with certainty whether Evans recorded the America of his youth [the 1930s], or invented it. Beyond doubt, the accepted myth of our recent past is in some measure the creation of this photographer, whose work has persuaded us of the validity of a new set of clues and symbols bearing on the question of who we are. Whether that work and its judgment was fact or artifice, or half of each, it is now part of our history.7
The same could be said of Fred Herzog’s photographs of Vancouver. In some circles they are already an important part of the history of the city. His images can be measured against the experience of those old enough to remember the place for themselves. For a younger audience, however, and for those beyond Vancouver, it is entirely possible that these images may slip into the role of stand-in for history. There are, of course, dangers here, since photographs often acquire a degree of authority in posterity that they never quite had when they were contemporary.8 But, as Szarkowski noted, the whole conundrum as to the status of the work is part of how it is received and lives on. It is the same pleasurable challenge we face watching Italian neorealist cinema, reading Dickens, or looking at Daumier’s drawings from life. We do not need to resolve the tension between document and art, only to be aware of how vital and nourishing it can be.
Thinking again about Fred Herzog’s admiration for Walker Evans, I am struck by the thought that the real parallel is not with Evans’s famous black-and-white work of the 1930s, but with the almost forgotten color photo-essays he produced in the 1950s and 1960s.9 Published in mainstream magazines as a counter-commentary on postwar American values, Evans was exploring many of the motifs and themes we find in Herzog’s pictures: informal shop displays, junkyards, the patina of the city, overlooked places, and the testy coexistence of old and new. Like Herzog, Evans was at odds with the general drift of modern society toward corporate anomie. Both men were searching for the everyday sights and objects for which they felt great affection. And both understood that the minor things that come under acute pressure from the forces of progress are often the keys to understanding the particular significance of an era.
In 1936 (the year Evans shot Houses and Billboards, Atlanta), the German critic Walter Benjamin noted: “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods so too does their mode of perception.”10 When an epoch passes, it takes with it the particular manner in which it had pictured itself. Herzog’s milieu and the way he recorded it are part of the same moment, artifacts of their time. But were these photographs meant to last? Were they for the sake of the future? Or were they the work of photographer simply staying sane, externalizing his feelings, preferences, and concerns in the course of his own passage through changing circumstances? There is no clear answer to this, but the question can never be too far from our appreciation of Herzog’s achievement.
In the late 1960s, Fred Herzog’s Kodachromes began to be recognized. From 1968 to 1974, he taught in the art departments at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia, while continuing his professional work in medical photography. Although he had plenty to offer the students, he rarely showed them his own images. In 1968, artscanada magazine carried one of his photographs on its cover, and the following year he exhibited thirty-six prints alongside Robbert Flick and Jack Dale in the exhibition Extensions at the UBC Fine Arts Gallery. The show toured Canada. In 1970, Herzog sold his first print, and in 1972, he had a solo show at the Mind’s Eye Gallery. At the same time, Herzog was also shooting for stock agencies and book publishers, and for many years his images were seen far less in the art press than in popular illustrated books such as The City of Vancouver (1976).11
Through the 1970s and early 1980s, the vanguard photography scene in Vancouver shifted toward the more overtly conceptual, strategic, and allegorical practices for which it would soon become renowned internationally. The work of artists using photography such as Iain Baxter, Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Roy Arden, and Stan Douglas remained indebted to the documentary tradition, and indeed to the depiction of common scenes in Vancouver, but Herzog’s work stayed below the radar. Perhaps it was not self-consciously arty enough, not prepossessing enough. Perhaps Herzog wasn’t either. His work garnered a small and appreciative following, but it was still not widely seen.
In 1986, Presentation House Gallery championed Herzog’s work in the group show Transition: Postwar Photography in Vancouver, and again in the 1994 show The Just Past of Photography. That year, Herzog also showed at Photobase Gallery and Graham Milne Gallery. By this time he had retired from his professional life. There was more time to look back at the vast archive he had accumulated. The transparencies were still in good condition (if looked after correctly, Kodachrome is reasonably stable). Color photography was now ubiquitous in contemporary art, but the biggest problem facing Herzog was how to make prints that really did justice to the subtlety of his slides. The information captured by his transparencies was extraordinarily rich, but none of the available printing techniques could truly express it. The standard procedure was to make Cibachrome prints in the darkroom, a process compromised by high contrast, oversaturation, and little means of controlling the outcome. Herzog was still keeping abreast of technological advances, and by around 2001 it was becoming clear that the solution to the problem would be digital. The transparencies could be scanned, the slight fading and color casts could be corrected, and any scratches removed. From these digital files inkjet prints of great tonal range and sensitivity could be made.12 At last the full beauty of Fred Herzog’s work could be appreciated.
In 2007, a major retrospective was presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery. With so many years of work from which to select, the show was a revelation. All along, Vancouver had harbored the kind of dedicated and thoughtful artist-observer that all cities wish for. It was also clear that Herzog had been able to make exceptional images away from home, on his trips abroad.
Major exhibitions soon followed across Canada and overseas, in Paris, Toulouse, New York, Calgary, Berlin, Toronto, and Ottawa. In making up for the delayed appreciation, critics and commentators began to compare Herzog’s images to the work of much better known figures including Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Saul Leiter, Harry Callahan, Ernst Haas, Garry Winogrand, Andy Warhol, Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore. These are among the best photographers of the twentieth century, and the long list of names is a good indication of the range and standard of Herzog’s work. There is much to be gained from such comparisons, but we should be wary of formal parallels and similarities of motif. Any of the photographers mentioned here could be compared fruitfully with any of the others. The best have more in common with each other than they have differences, and a unique “signature style” is a very unusual phenomenon in this medium. Let’s just say that they all shared something of the same attitude toward the noticeable world and the medium.
Moreover, it’s entirely possible that other photographers of Herzog’s commitment and abilities may come to light. Great photography can be made in the public eye by those eager for recognition in their own time, but it can also be made quietly in the margins, away from the spotlight, perhaps to be lost in obscurity, perhaps to be discovered later. In 1962, the film critic Manny Farber distinguished between what he called “termite art” and “white elephant art.” Termite artists get on with their work with little regard for posterity or critical affirmation. They are “ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” They have a “bug-like immersion in a small area without point or aim, and, over all, concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin.”13 On the other hand, “white elephant art” is made in the self-conscious pursuit of transcendent greatness and in the channels where greatness is conventionally noted. The white elephant artist is likely to “pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance.”14 We need not choose between these two. Great work can be made by either, and history suggests that this is perhaps more true of photography than any other medium. Why? Because the craft is so simple. There is almost no technical bar to great achievement.
Beyond the framework of photo history and its canons, however, Herzog’s work is clearly of great social and historical interest as a document of his adopted city. Just as his photographs were finding a wider audience, it was becoming clear to even the most stubborn that many of our cities, and Vancouver in particular, had been physically transformed in ways that were unconscionably cynical and dispiriting. The kinds of architecture, informal social spaces, and layering of material history to which Fred Herzog was so drawn had been swept aside. In their place came a dense and homogenous landscape determined by raw capital, and insensitive to its inhabitants. The dominant materials were concrete, steel, and glass, almost impervious to patina and in denial of the idea that a building could and should age well. Under this all too familiar regime, space is optimized and exploited ruthlessly, with little or no land left idle. Poor areas can be gentrified, and if buildings are not economical enough, they are torn down and replaced, with cheap and temporary structures if necessary.
This is something the photographer Jeff Wall addresses with great care in his essay on Herzog’s work. A generation younger, Wall has made nearly all of his own pictures in and around Vancouver, and in many respects they show what has happened to the city. Indeed the international success of Wall’s photographs hinges in part upon the generic city he inherited. Very few of his photographs speak specifically of Vancouver as a locality. Most depict scenes that could take place in any industrialized society. In a 2010 questionnaire for the British art magazine Frieze, Wall was asked “What should stay the same?” He replied:
I’d like to see certain places remain as they are or, better, as they were when I first encountered them. Alleyways or open, unused or neglected spaces in the city of Vancouver (or any city), spaces that weren’t useful for whatever reason and got left in an in-between state—between nature and dereliction—and which I have always somehow associated with freedom. But they can’t stay the same and they haven’t; they’ve been built over now and built over with things I can’t associate with the happiness I’m looking for.15
On the magazine’s page, Wall’s words were complemented by Fred Herzog’s Wreck at Georgia / Dunlevy (1966), a photograph of abandoned cars in a parched empty lot. In the background we see an ad hoc row of buildings of various ages, all typical of pre-1970s Vancouver. The formal unity of the picture, with its blues, grays, and dry browns is undercut by the state of flux and gentle contradiction that informs the best of Herzog’s urban landscapes. It is not a romantic depiction of a failing space: Herzog clearly understood the processes of socioeconomic transformation and was able to make telling images of them. But let us compare Wreck at Georgia / Dunlevy with a photograph Jeff Wall made two decades later, Bad Goods (1985). The topography and palette are similar, but Wall’s wasteland is edged by the kind of modular units that we know from industrial parks on the edges of developed cities the world over.16 Moreover, instead of Herzog’s implicit tension, Wall offers us a fraught standoff between the camera/observer and what might be a First Nations citizen, over a box of abandoned lettuce. The city’s in-between spaces may well be associated with freedom, play, and possibility, but they are also spaces of alienation. Indeed, freedom and alienation are always intertwined here. That is part of the attraction of such hinterlands for artists, documentary photographers, and those wanting, or forced, to remain apart from the mainstream of society.
I opened with the suggestion that Fred Herzog’s work is a great gift. While we are obliged to accept any gift with gratitude and good grace, we may also have other feelings. Do we deserve this? Was it intended for us in the first instance, or are we secondary recipients?17 What motivated the gift to be made? Not everyone is as attentive to their surrounding as Fred Herzog, and of those, very few decide to photograph it so comprehensively.
Notes
1 Fred Herzog, “Exploring Vancouver in the Fifties and Sixties,” West Coast Line 39, no. 2 (2005), p. 160-161
2 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961; repr., New York, 1992), p. 50.
3 Herzog 2005 (see note 1), p. 160-161.
4 The popular reputation of Kodachrome is that it was gaudy and oversaturated amateur film. Perhaps we should blame the Paul Simon song: “Kodachrome, They give us those nice bright colors, They give us the greens of summers, Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day” (Paul Simon, “Kodachrome,” 1973). It was far subtler than that.
5 “An Interview with Fred Herzog,” Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs, exh. cat. Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver, 2007), p. 123-132
6 Walker Evans, “Photography,” in Quality: Its Image in the Arts, ed. Louis Kronenberger (New York, 1969), p. 169-171
7 John Szarkowski, Walker Evans, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1971), p. 20
8 This historical and semantic shift is what Jean-François Lyotard had in mind when he wrote of the construction of the past: “Reality succumbs to this reversal: it was the given described by the phrase, it became the archive from which are drawn documents or examples that validate the description.” Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute(Minneapolis, 1988), p. 41.
9 See David Campany, Walker Evans: The Magazine Work (Göttingen, 2014).
10 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” second version (1935–1936) inThe Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael Jennings et al. (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2008), p. 23.
11 The City of Vancouver (Vancouver, 1976), text by Barry Broadfoot et al., photographs by Fred Herzog.
12 Many photographers who had worked in color felt liberated by the possibilities of digital scanning and printing. See, for example, the digital inkjet prints made by Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, and Jeff Wall.
13 Manny Farber, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” (1962), in Negative Space (New York, 1998), p. 134-144
14 Ibid., p. 141.
15 Jeff Wall, “Interview,” Frieze 130 (2010), p. 143.
16 This is the kind of architecture that Lewis Baltz photographed for his landmark book The New Industrial Park Near Irvine, California (New York, 1974).
17 “What has shaped me is growing up without parents who loved me, more than anything else. That was what made me streetwise. Almost nothing else, not even the war, did that.” Fred Herzog in Marsha Lederman, “The Collision: Fred Herzog, the Holocaust and Me,” The Globe and Mail, May 5, 2012.