Fred Herzog and Citizen History
By Richard Eriksson on May 10, 2007 - 12:29pm
You have a few days left to visit the Vancouver Art Gallery to see Fred Herzog's photographs from the 1950s of Vancouver and Vancouverites, which shows a short interview of the photographer and another room featuring his photos projected with the theme of The City as Art. (The city as museum!) I strongly recommend it, especially if you can go on a night where lots of people attend: as a 10-year resident of the city, and in my late 20s, I don't have much history here, but overhearing those who have lived hear reflect on the past of a city sometimes described as a city without a past. Almost too bad there aren't microphones recording these conversations: the photographs evoke memories of neighbourhoods lost or grown, some now barely recognizable but still with their distinguishing features. Call it citizen history or crowd-source history, which are new words for "people's history", but these stories and perspectives are important and interesting.
Herzog captured the mundanity of a growing city, much like John Goldsmith in Vancouver and Kemp Attwood in Paris, France, do today. (To name two street scene photographers on my Flickr contact list, hoping not to intimidate them with comparing them with someone with Herzog's stature.) I'm just a beginning hobbyist photographer, interested in people and urban transportation (esp. trains) but I find Goldsmith's and Attwood's and Herzog's photographs, and the philosophy of documenting places and small events of the city that might blow away in the winds of history, very inspiring.
But enough faux-pretentiousness: the exhibit shows until May 13th, so time is running out. As a bonus, there's even a Jeff Wall photograph on the bottom floor in the Photography as Theatre exhibit on the ground floor!
R, thank so much for the flattering words. I am most humbled by any comparison -- really.
For many months I wanted to see the Herzog exhibit. Finally, on the last weekend of its showing, I made a trip to the show with Mark Demeny. It was both incredible and inspirational. It was everything I had expected and much more. His vision was incredible, as was Herzog's drippy use of saturated colours. The city was new for him, just as it is for you and me. Just as we are lucky to have had Herzog, there are also other local greats, including Jeff Wall, or BC's newest mainstage photographer-painter, Tim Gardner, who recently had his work shown at the VAG and England's National Gallery in London who has lifelike paintings created from photographs.
Like Vancouver in Herzog's day, our city is undergoing a tremendous transformation -- with both good and bad results. Similarly to you, Richard, I came to Vancouver only recently. I was living in Chicago until four years ago. Our city's change in that short time is obvious even to me. With the 2010 Olympics, the building boom, and Vancouver's repeated success of being named a top world city, it is obvious that our city is going to the next level. I look forward to this change, but I also have my concerns. Nevertheless, I hope to capture it in some meaningful way, like Herzog did.
As a side note, I enourage Vancouverites to look up the Regional Vancouver Urban Observatory (RVu), which is a client of mine. Urbanization is having an enormous impact around the globe with both local and global issues, whether with housing or the environment. We are seeing these impacts here, with a lack of affordable housing and transportation issues, like BC's Gateway Program. To study this urbanization, Rvu was created with support from the United Nations. It was first of many urban observatories around the world created to study the impact of urbanization.
Anyway . . . thanks for the nice promotion of Herzog and his important work, and the more than generous comparison.
All the best!
John
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