Fred Herzog: A Color Legacy
Previously unseen photographs from the archive of Fred Herzog shed new light on a body of work that helped redefine the place of color in twentieth-century photography. At a time when serious photographic practice was still largely confined to black and white, Herzog embraced Kodachrome in the 1950s and 1960s, using its saturated reds and warm tonalities to render everyday urban life with uncommon precision and sensitivity. His street photographs observe people and their movements with clarity and restraint, balancing distance and intimacy, irony and empathy.
After settling in Vancouver in 1953, Herzog made the city his primary subject, gradually constructing a vivid, enduring portrait of its streets, neighborhoods, and social fabric. Vancouver became the center of his visual universe, though he also traveled extensively through the United States, the Caribbean, and Central America, always working with a Leica and the same attentive eye for color, light, and structure. Across these images, color is never decorative; it functions as a descriptive and emotional tool, shaping the rhythm of the city and the relationships within it.
The photographs presented here, newly released from Herzog’s archive and selected in collaboration with Equinox Gallery, extend and deepen this legacy. They offer fresh insight into a practice that was both quietly radical and profoundly consistent, reaffirming Herzog’s position as one of the key pioneers of modern color photography.
About the Author
Fred Herzog was born in 1930 in Bad Friedrichshall, Germany. After early experiences with black-and-white photography in Europe, he emigrated to Canada in 1952, briefly living in Toronto before settling in Vancouver in 1953. That same year, he made his first color photograph in the city’s Downtown East Side, an area he would continue to photograph for decades.
From the late 1950s onward, Herzog worked for more than thirty years as a medical photographer at the University of British Columbia, eventually becoming Head of the Department of Biomedical Communications. Alongside this role, he taught photography at UBC and Simon Fraser University and participated in significant exhibitions and artist-led projects beginning in the late 1960s.
Although he first exhibited his work in 1966, broader recognition came later, with major exhibitions in Canada, the United States, and Europe from the 1990s onward. His photographs have been widely published, including the influential book Modern Color. Herzog, who became a Canadian citizen in 1959, lived and worked in Vancouver throughout his life and is recognized as a foundational figure in the history of color photography.
