Fred Herzog was born in Germany in 1930, and immigrated to Vancouver, BC in 1953. Throughout his career he worked almost exclusively with Kodachrome slide film, and only in the past decade did technology allow him to make archival pigment prints that match the exceptional colour and intensity of the Kodachrome slide. Herzog’s use of colour was unusual in the 1950s and 60s, a time when art photography was almost exclusively associated with black and white imagery. In this respect, his photographs can be seen as a pre-figuration of the “New Colour” photographers of the 1970s.
Herzog worked as a medical photographer by day and spent his weekends documenting the storefronts, crowds, cafes, and billboards of his adopted hometown. His images evoke the later work of fellow color photographers William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and Joel Meyerowitz.
