What Material Does Nadia Herzog Use in Her Art

[Summertime 2008]

For more than fifty years, Fred Herzog has roamed the streets of Vancouver. His camera dwells on the raw fabric of the city: 2nd-hand stores, restaurants, storefront windows, barbershops, and vacant lots, and the people using those spaces. The selection of images presented here stems from a body of work that comprises hundreds of images. All of theses works share a bold and innovative use of colour and attest to the artist's interest in human interactions inside mutating cityscapes.

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  Fred Herzog, Howe and Nelson, 1960, Impressions jet d'encre / Inkjet prints l.8 cm x 76.two cm et 76.2 cm 10 l.viii cm. © Fred Herzog

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  Fred Herzog, New World Confectionery, 1965, Impressions jet d'encre / Inkjet prints 50.8 cm x 76.2 cm et 76.2 cm 10 fifty.8 cm. © Fred Herzog

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  Fred Herzog, Black Human being Pender, 1958, Impressions jet d'encre / Inkjet prints fifty.8 cm x 76.2 cm et 76.2 cm x 50.viii cm. © Fred Herzog

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  Fred Herzog, Elysium Cleaners, 1958, Impressions jet d'encre / Inkjet prints 50.8 cm x 76.2 cm et 76.ii cm 10 50.8 cm. © Fred Herzog

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  Fred Herzog, Hastings and Carrall, 1968, Impressions jet d'encre / Inkjet prints l.8 cm x 76.2 cm et 76.2 cm x l.8 cm. © Fred Herzog

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  Fred Herzog, Magazine Human being, 1959, Impressions jet d'encre / Inkjet prints l.viii cm 10 76.2 cm et 76.two cm x 50.eight cm. © Fred Herzog

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  Fred Herzog, Untitled, 2001, Impressions jet d'encre / Inkjet prints 50.8 cm ten 76.2 cm et 76.two cm x 50.8 cm. © Fred Herzog

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  Fred Herzog, Fred Herzog, Second Hand Shop, Cordova St., 1961, Impressions jet d'encre / Inkjet prints 50.8 cm x 76.2 cm et 76.2 cm x 50.viii cm. © Fred Herzog

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  Fred Herzog, Fishseller, 1958, Impressions jet d'encre / Inkjet prints l.8 cm x 76.2 cm et 76.2 cm x 50.8 cm. © Fred Herzog

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  Fred Herzog, Kuo Kong Silk, 1967, Impressions jet d'encre / Inkjet prints fifty.8 cm x 76.two cm et 76.ii cm ten l.8 cm. © Fred Herzog

by Helga Pakasaar

"When y'all have seen the city to a point when you lot think you have washed it all, the horizon volition suddenly sustain a crack and a new bicycle of hitherto unseen phenomena will begin to course shadows on your film." – Fred Herzog

"Perception is to take seen." – Fernando Pessoa

Fred Herzog began to take photographs of the urban landscape of Vancouver in 1953, shortly afterwards emigrating from Deutschland, and he has non stopped since. Until 2002, he shot i hundred rolls of film a year, from which he has amassed an annal of images that contributes to the long photographic tradition of urban landscape studies. While Herzog has photographed in locations from remote hamlets in Nova Scotia to busy San Francisco streets, his focus has been on Vancouver. His in-depth study documents half a century of changes. Often revisiting the same neighbourhoods and street corners over many years, he has observed urban life through methodical investigations – what Walter Benjamin chosen "botanizing the asphalt." Interestingly, while information technology is now entering the annals of the history of art photography, this body of work besides functions as a significant record, and perhaps the simply extensive documentary one, of Vancouver over a long menstruum, offering insights into a history that otherwise could be gleaned just from commercial, regime, and news images.

It could well be said that Herzog is an of import pioneer in colour photography.

Herzog depicts an urban fabric of shifting spatial relations. Fatigued to places in transition, he shoots primarily in the older working-class neighbourhoods and downtown core of the city. He has a predilection for locations that bear history and reveal the accretions of change, rather than the standardized architecture of generic suburbs and urban-development schemes. His street photographs of everyday life prove a urban center of diverse cultural and socio-economic conditions. Waterfront scenes record Vancouver'southward development from a provincial resource-based hub to a container-ship port in the global economic system. Downtown sidewalks energized by the vibrant electricity of neon signs sweep the viewer through public infinite as an empathetic part of the crowd. The cityscape is seen as a dynamic collage of textures in which diverse handmade and commercial signs and billboards are piled one on superlative of the other competing for attention. Such a chatter of messages in a field of signs is no longer possible in today's highly regulated public air space determined past strict sign bylaws and corporate command of generic billboards aimed at vehicular traffic more than pedestrians.

Herzog'due south scenes are often animated by the presence of words read through the language of graphic pattern, creating a play of surface and space. This fascination with conventions of display is evident in his many photographs of display systems in windows, the taxonomies of 2d-hand stores, and the ordering system of a magazine stand up in which Existent Story is beside True Story and Mad lies next to Crazy. Information technology is the idiosyncrasies of a handwritten sign or an assortment of goods that speaks of the particularity of locale. Every bit he has said,

"The photo-realist hopes to discover unseen treasures, picturesque disorder, over-the-tiptop nasty disorder, naïve art by housewives and gardeners, decay of all descriptions, and the multicoloured results of misdemeanour, if non crime."¹ His sharply observed documents propose that there might still be a mode to make sense of the disorder and layers of information. Fatigued to the collage aesthetic of disjunction, he allows the disparate and eclectic to address one another.

With a deep affection for the vernacular and a keen heart for item, Herzog is drawn to the outmoded and discarded. His pictures of cultural artefacts – buildings, décor, menus, clothing, tools, magazines, and means of life such as selling fish on the sidewalk – course a type of archæology. There is an elegiac mood to his prosaic scenes that makes them seem to be defenseless in history. Anticipating collective urban memory, they are vulnerable to a nostalgic reading, yet   Herzog avoids any glorification of the past or want for historical continuity. Rather, he is an engaged participant who records specific moments as lived feel. The detritus of consumer civilization is seen as a natural status generated from entropy, from change itself. It is the chaotic energies and the disjunctions of old and new that drive the city's vitality. The subject area matter of Herzog's pictures amplifies the notion that street photography is a serial of shocks and collisions. As a field study about a place, his photographs are reminders of how we understand identify every bit a genius loci.

Herzog's images take a descriptive clarity and immediacy, but he does not insert his emotion, quite different from the skewed perspectives and expressive techniques of many of the street photographers of his fourth dimension. While he is an admirer of Robert Frank, Herzog is more of an eagle-eyed observer at a slight remove who waits for the raking light of late afternoon or an expressive bodily gesture. His understated point of view is closer to the documentary style of Walker Evans, although Herzog is decidedly positioned in the scene. By giving every chemical element equal value, his pictures breathe and welcome a search through the field of dense information.

Within the focused singularity of his extended projection, Herzog has embraced considerable experimentation, non the to the lowest degree of which is that from the get-go he chose to work primarily in colour and developed new techniques for exploring its formal qualities. In the 1950s, colour photography in a documentary way was not withal considered an fine art form, and information technology wasn't until the late 1970s that it began to be shown and collected by museums. Thus, information technology could well be said that Herzog is an important pioneer in colour photography. The fact that he has only recently been best-selling as a notable photographer perhaps says more about the belated impulse to canonize western Canadian art, especially a narrative of art photography, than most a provincial condition. Geographic isolation has non prevented him from beingness well informed about current art photography and literature. It is also significant that as the histories of photography become increasingly expansive and international. Herzog was known every bit a medical photographer and teacher of photography who occasionally had shows over the years, but his do remained unarticulated until recently, and to a large extent it is still inaccessible today, with thousands of slides yet to be unpacked from boxes. He favoured slide shows over cumbersome and expensive printing processes, and information technology is only now, with digital printing techniques, that he can produce photographs equal to the richness of slides. His remarkable body of photographs asserts that the value of a highly personal, methodical study of a city, unimpeded past the demands of clients, fourth dimension constraints, or artistic dictates, tin far exceed that of official historical documents.

one  Fred Herzog, interview, in Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs (Vancouver: Vancouver Fine art Gallery and Douglas & McIntyre, 2007), p. 27.

Helga Pakasaar is a contemporary-fine art curator based in Vancouver. She is presently curator at Presentation Business firm Gallery, where she presented exhibitions by Fred Herzog in 1986 and 1994. Her projects accept often featured historical and contemporary photography and media art. In addition to an ongoing independent do, she has been curator at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario, and Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff.

This text is reproduced with the writer's permission. © Helga Pakasaar

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