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Images of a lost Vancouver
John Mackie Fifty years ago, a young German immigrant named Fred Herzog started wandering the streets of Vancouver, photographing things he thought were interesting. He loved the signage, the jumble of the streets, the hubbub of people going about their daily business on Hastings or Granville. And he tried to shoot it as it was -- and is -- rather than staging photos or having people pose. He started out doing it for fun, but soon realized he was doing something important: documenting Vancouver the way it really existed. "I was aware I was taking art," recalls Herzog, now 74, who recently mounted some of his photos on two websites, www.fredherzog.com and www.imageworks.com. "That's the conceit of young people. I knew that what I [was] doing was not only unique, but that some day I was going to unpack that and shock people with it." Over the years, Herzog estimates he took 90,000 colour slide images of the city, along with 28,000 black-and-white negatives. In his photos, a lost city re-emerges. That city is incredibly vibrant, colourful, a bit chaotic, a little rough around the edges. Herzog's Vancouver is a city of second-hand stores, corner groceries and the working port. His photos evoke strong emotions in people who were around in the '50s and '60s, and are a revelation to those who weren't. Herzog's 1958 shot Hastings and Columbia may be the single best image ever taken of Hastings Street in its prime. The street bustles with people and the building fronts are a glorious hodgepodge of neon signs, from the Smilin' Buddha Cabaret to the Western Sports Centre and an arcade topped by a giant clown. Neon figures prominently in many of Herzog's photos, none more so than another 1958 shot of Hastings between Carrall and Columbia. Taken at night, it is dazzling, a neon wonderland featuring the Lux Theatre's elegant pink neon marquee, The Hub's two-storey orange neon arrow and the White Lunch restaurant's orange neon coffee cup with blue neon steam rising out of the top. "The swirl of steam over the cup is pure genius," says Herzog. "The White Lunch was an institution. I can tell you what I ate there: braised sirloin tips and a custard pudding with a little bit of rice in the bottom." Coming from Europe, Herzog was blown away by all the colourful commercial signs in North America in the '50s. He also understood their cultural importance in creating a kind of "casual art." "The neon signs and the soft-drink signs, the cigarette ads and
the billboards and the posters and the graffiti and collages of torn-off
posters, all that contributes to make the city a place where art actually
happens," says Herzog. He picks up a 1960 print of Bogner's Grocery featuring a quartet of kids in front of a small store literally covered in Coca-Cola, 7-Up and Red Rose Tea signs. There are big signs, little signs, horizontal signs, vertical signs, window signs, "push-bar" door signs and signs that jut into the street. "A store like this was a gem," he says. "You cannot fake that. Look how casually they nailed this big sign over the small one. The Coca-Cola man says 'We've got another big sign,' and the person who owns the store says 'Well put it up.' " Stores like this no longer exist, and most of Vancouver's neon signs are gone as well. Which is why photos like Herzog's 1957 shot of the neon jumble on Granville street at Smithe have become quite historically important, the premier photographic record of Vancouver's neon heyday. "Oh, neon signs," he sighs. "This was one of the greatest uses of technology, to make people happy. When you went to town in Vancouver in the 1950s, you had the experience of going to town. That's gone. "If you go to this spot on Granville Street [today], all you see is trees. This is what bothers me about the city. Everything that had interest or teeth or contradiction or American blaring culture, which makes our cities interesting [is gone]. "Take that away and it's all grey. Now when we go to Granville Street, it almost looks like an East German slum. It's not nice."
Herzog's pictures have appeared in several books and magazines over the years, and his classic 1950s black-and-white photo of a bunch of teenagers at a motorcycle rally in North Vancouver was used for the album cover jacket for Prism's Young and Restless release in 1980. But most of his photos have never been seen by the public because Herzog did them in his spare time, as a hobby. His day job was as a medical photographer at the University of British Columbia, although he also taught photography at UBC and Simon Fraser University. Born in Stuttgart, Germany on Sept. 21, 1930, he lost both his parents when he was young (his mother died of typhoid in 1941, while his father survived the Second World War, only to die of cancer just after it ended). Money was tight in post-war Germany and he dropped out of high school to go to work. In 1952, he emigrated to Canada, living in Toronto for a year before settling in Vancouver. Herzog worked as a seaman for Union Steamships when he first arrived in Vancouver, and credits the long voyages to Alaska for completing his education (he would read books to while away the hours). He first picked up a camera in 1950, and in Canada was encouraged by his friend Ferro Marincowitz to take up medical photography. He volunteered at hospitals, living off his savings from the ships, but eventually landed a job at St. Paul's Hospital and then UBC, where he worked from 1961 to 1990. On weekends and at night, he would take to the streets. Unfortunately, his pockets weren't overflowing with cash, so he often would take only one photo of a subject. "When I see that I only have one slide of [a scene], I think 'How the hell did I not find the money to take two?' Honestly, it was a question of eating in those days. In those days, I put everything into photography." Time was also at a premium, so he usually opted to shoot colour transparency slides that were developed by Kodak instead of developing black-and-white negatives in his own darkroom. In retrospect, shooting in colour was a brilliant idea: the colour on those old Kodachrome transparencies is amazingly rich, like a photographic version of Technicolor movies. His subject matter was varied, but he had a strong sense of what he was looking for: real life. "I was trying to show vitality," he says. "The pictures are about content. And if there is no content, take no picture. "Content cannot be manufactured, in my opinion. That which I can find is better than that which you can make." He had a great eye for original subject matter. Years before Andy Warhol turned everyday objects into pop art, he was photographing Coca-Cola signs. And you'd be hard-pressed to find many other photographers who documented second-hand shops in the '50s and '60s like Herzog. "I call [second-hand stores] a microcosm of American culture," he says. "All the things we want to have, all the things we need to have and all the things we'd love to have wind up in second-hand shops, in that kind of condensed fashion." He points to his 1961 image of a second-hand store window on Cordova Street that features a bit of everything: shovels, axes, picks, work boots, cowboy boots, a suit, belts, luggage, a tennis racquet, a tool belt, a guitar and all sorts of hand-drawn signs. "This is an art piece," he states.
"I'm not saying my picture is an art piece. But if you could freeze that window and carry it into an art gallery, you could show that in New York and ask $50,000 for it. And you'd get it. And they'd say 'Why didn't I know about it? Now I have to pay $100,000, because that guy wants to sell it to me for $100,000.' "That's how much that store would be worth if you could have preserved it and transported it to New York as is, authentically. To have a photograph of that is the next best thing. And who else would have thought of taking that then?" Herzog has been respected in the artistic community for years: he took photos for the legendary conceptual artist Iain Baxter of N.E. Thing Co. fame, and was one of the photographers featured in the acclaimed Presentation House exhibit Unfinished Business: Vancouver Street Photographs, 1955 to 1985 a couple of years ago. He hopes to put together a solo exhibit and a book within a couple of years. In the interim, he's selling prints online through Imageworks. He is very proud of his part in preserving Vancouver's past, although he's not always happy with the present. He picks up two photos taken from an identical spot on the Granville Bridge looking northwest to downtown. In his 1957 photo, the West End is all houses and the False Creek waterfront is a working harbour. In 2004, there are so many highrises that you can't see the North Shore mountains. "This is not interesting," he says of the 2004 picture. "This is how the whole world looks. Modern architecture -- we have a way with cement, and everybody else does too. Whether you're in China or Malaysia or Europe, it all looks like this. It's probably good -- it saves space, you have many people living above each other, you don't have to use agricultural land. It's good. But it's not interesting. "This was interesting," he says, pointing to the picture of the lost Vancouver. jmackie@png.canwest.com © The Vancouver Sun 2005 Used without permission from The Vancouver Sun |
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