Photographs by Fred Herzog

Fred Herzog: Photographs  is the definitive book about the stunning oeuvre of a pioneer of colour photography—Vancouver's Fred Herzog. While the title is neither innovative nor unique (another book with the same title was published a few months earlier), the images display the same innovative approach to color photography typically associated with William Eggleston (though the content is strikingly different -- often looking like classic Walker Evans in color).

For more than five decades, Fred Herzog has focused his lens on street life, and his striking colour photographs—of vacant lots, second-hand shops, neon signs and working-class people—evoke nostalgia in an older generation and inspire wide-eyed revelation in a younger one.

The images that we now consider iconic once relegated Herzog to the margins: his bold use of colour was unusual in the 1950s and ’60s, a time when art photography was almost exclusively associated with black-and-white imagery. Fred Herzog has worked with Kodachrome slide film for over 50 years, but only in the past few years has technology allowed him to make archival pigment photographic prints of exceptional colour and intensity.