OSMOS is pleased to present CHROMAZONE, an exhibition featuring photographs by Catherine DeLattre and Fred Herzog, which opened on March 26 and remained on view through May 2.

Catherine DeLattre and Fred Herzog both embraced the possibilities of color at a time when most photographers were still working in black and white. DeLattre, born and raised in Monongahela, Pennsylvania—a small town near the heavily industrial area of Pittsburgh—studied photography in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when training typically emphasized black-and-white processes. Nevertheless, she chose to work with a TLR Mamiya medium-format camera and Kodak color negative film.

Similarly, Herzog, born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1930 and later immigrating to Vancouver, Canada, in 1953, worked almost exclusively with Kodachrome slide film throughout his career. Though relatively unknown during his lifetime, Herzog’s color photography from the 1950s and 1960s anticipated the work of the “New Color” photographers of the 1970s.

Both artists only began producing prints of their work decades later, when digital inkjet technology made it possible to achieve a level of richness and fidelity in color that earlier methods could not provide. Much of the work DeLattre shot in the 1970s and 1980s was printed only recently, after she acquired a digital printer. Likewise, Herzog began printing his images more extensively in the past decade, when archival pigment printing techniques allowed him to match the extraordinary intensity of Kodachrome.

For both artists, autonomy and unstructured time were essential to their practice. Alongside a strong sensitivity to color, their work demonstrates a profound sense of place. DeLattre—best known for her series Shoppers, street photographs of women on New York City’s Upper West Side made between 1979 and 1980—has more recently turned to landscape photography in Wayne County, Northeast Pennsylvania. As she describes it, these images depict “not the postcard version of America but a quieter, lonelier one—the rural stretch of land between towns, the openness, the houses… all very American, but in solitude.”

Herzog similarly moved beyond the “postcard” view of his surroundings. Rather than focusing on Vancouver’s coastal vistas and lush mountains, he directed his attention to working-class neighborhoods such as Chinatown, Strathcona, and East Hastings. There, the interplay of daily life—merchants and customers, vivid signage, and the energy of the street—not only offered compelling subject matter but also reinforced his commitment to color as a means of capturing what he saw as the vitality and generosity of urban life.

About the Authors

Catherine DeLattre (b. 1949) lives and works in New York City and Pennsylvania. She has had solo exhibitions at OSMOS Station, Stamford, NY (2025); Abraham et Wolff Gallery, Paris (2024); and Trout Brook Studios, Hancock, NY (2023). Her work is held in several collections, including the Everson Museum of Art, the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, and the Florida Museum of Fine Arts. Her photographs were presented with OSMOS at Paris Photo 2025, where the New York Times recognized her work as one of the “5 Treasures of Photography” at the fair.