When We Were Young

Fred Herzog's photographs of 1950s Vancouver reveal a city on the verge of transformation: animated, convivial and innocent.

By Gary Stephen Ross

DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR, Fred Herzog’s high school was moved out of Stuttgart, Germany, where he’d lived since he was a small boy. A good thing, too: like Dresden and Hamburg, Stuttgart was levelled by Allied bombs. “The phenomenon of a big city like that, and many of the people in it, being wiped out is beyond the imagination,” he says. “That probably imbued me with a certain skepticism and even pessimism.” It may also have given him an appreciation of the ways cities change, sometimes abruptly, sometimes gradually. He arrived here in May 1953, having read about Vancouver in a high school geography text, and he’s been taking colour photographs of his adopted home more or less continuously ever since. Whether working aboard ships as a member of the Seafarers International Union, at St. Paul’s Hospital as a medical photographer, or at SFU and UBC teaching photography, he’s spent more than five decades documenting Vancouver’s evolution from ramshackle seaport to cosmopolitan city. Originally inspired by the American realist photographers Robert Frank and Walker Evans, he’s made almost 100,000 slides of Vancouver’s people and evolving cityscape.

“His work is unique,” says Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of B.C. Art at the VAG, which will hang a major retrospective of Herzog’s photographs early in the new year (and co-publish, with Douglas & McIntyre, Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs). “He was doing things with colour that no one else was at that time. He also had amazing technical ability, working with slow film in difficult conditions. But it’s that sense of a perceiving consciousness that makes the photographs. His ability to see things is quite remarkable.”

Herzog has a philosophical bent, he’s travelled widely (sometimes to photograph butterflies) and he finds in the city re-interpretations of Christian concepts in the face of growing materialism. In a sense, his work can be viewed as an ongoing exploration of North American icons and archetypes. An element of social commentary is there, though less in his sly allusions to impoverishment and inequality than in his choice of recurrent subjects: gaudy, larger-than-life billboards promising a better life behind the wheel of a shiny new Pontiac, the first sleek highrises springing like weeds from the compost of downtown shops and rooming houses, the garish neon and false fronts that gave Granville Street its tawdry charm. Mostly, though, the photographs urge no judgement upon the viewer, take no side in the eternal dialectic between rich and poor, hope and despair, past and future. They simply capture, with forceful and unsentimental vividness, a time in the city’s life now almost lost to memory—and to our sometimes compelling, sometimes absurd notions of progress.

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