Fred Herzog

(Pender Street, Vancouver, 1959. I'm pretty sure this is the same block I work on)

I finally got around to seeing the Fred Herzog exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery today. Having recently spent a lot of time taking photographs around Vancouver, it was fascinating to see snapshots of life in the city from as far back as 50 years ago.

Herzog came to Vancouver in 1953 and has been taking photographs ever since. Many of the photographs were produced on Kodachrome, a color slide film, and the images all have a very distinctive 'warm' look to them.

It's interesting to see how Vancouver has changed over the last fifty years. I still consider Vancouver a very young city, but the exhibition definitely gave me a sense of the community's history and personality. Many may think of Vancouver's multiculturalism as a relatively new thing, but I was struck by the variety of cultures back then, often contained within the same frame.

It was also a bit of a shock to see images of the West End before all of the highrises started to blot out the horizon. Strangely, some images (particularly of Granville Street) seemed almost more cluttered back then with their overlapping neon signs, billboards and posters.

You can view Fred Herzog's website here. There are also more images at the Equinox Gallery website here.