Paris Photo LA 2013: –Equinox Gallery

Equinox Gallery (Vancouver) presents a solo exhibition of early color street photographs (1953 to 1984) by Vancouver-based photographer Fred Herzog (born 1930). This will be the first time Herzog’s work has been exhibited in Los Angeles. Fred Herzog’s ascent in the art world has been most unusual; his first exhibition at age 76 was a major retrospective held at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2007. He has exhibited widely since then, including exhibitions at The National Gallery of Canada (solo), C/O Berlin (solo), Laurence Miller Gallery (solo), and Somerset House (London, UK). His work was further brought to art world prominence by Jeff Wall in Herzog’s monograph published in 2011. Fred Herzog has worked almost exclusively with Kodachrome slide film for over 50 years, a color slide film that was notoriously difficult to work with in a spontaneous fashion. Only in the past six years has technology allowed him to make archival pigment prints that match the exceptional color and intensity of the Kodachrome slide. The artist’s use of color was unusual in the 1950s and 60s, a time when art photography was almost exclusively associated with black and white imagery. In this respect, Herzog’s photographs can be seen as a pre-figuration of the “New Color” photographers of the 1970s. Over the past five decades, Fred Herzog has drawn upon the same practices as Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, and Saul Leiter in creating an idiosyncratic body of work that traces the impact of modernity on growing cities on the west coast of North America.