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Modern Color, by Fred Herzog

It’s my opinion that Modern Color, by Fred Herzog, is not only an incredible collection of photographs, but a masterclass in the medium itself. Interestingly, not because of his much-heralded use of color.
Herzog was German-born, 1930. His mother died when he was 11, his dad not long after. Herzog’s relationship with the war, which took both his parents, was likely too personal for him to ever appreciate the magnitude of the holocaust. Biographies have sidestepped this aspect of his life whenever possible, but it’s not hard to find evidence of his own inner conflict, if you want.
For the purposes of this article, I simply want to discuss Herzog’s art and what remains essential about his approach. Of all the photographers in my own long list of inspirations, there is something about Herzog that stands above. It has to do with what I consider the core building blocks of all photography. Deep down, photography is about learning to see. And if that ability is at the heart of photography, perhaps nobody existed quite as distinctly in the myocardium as Fred Herzog.
Some quick facts:
Herzog started taking color photos of the grittier part of Vancouver in the early 50’s. Nobody was doing that at the time. Most “serious” photography was in black and white.
He took the majority of his images with 35mm cameras, sometimes point-and-shoots, mostly with a 50mm lens. He used Kodachrome film almost exclusively.
In his time, a small 35mm camera was a rare object and so people didn’t have the feelings about it they do today. This gave him a freedom to photograph people in bold ways that is much harder today.
He shot constantly. Two rolls of film a week. Hundreds of thousands of images over his life.
Recognition for his work came slow and methodically for Herzog, going from hobbyist to teacher to recognized artist. He lived a modest life in a modest house and never lost his desire to shoot.
He worked in and around many other famous photographers of the time: Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Louis Stettner, Saul Leiter, etc. He was heavily influenced — and inspired — by great photography being done around him. And likewise, many other photographers became influenced and inspired by him, too: Lee Friedlander, Jeff Wall, William Eggleston and thousands of young photographers thereafter.
In a small documentary on Herzog’s work, one photography professor describes the appeal of his images thusly: “Fred’s work is seen as a kind of freedom. As someone who did what he wanted to do without any expectations of societal reward for that work.” To this end, Herzog holds a bit of a revered status among photographers because he seemed to stay in his pocket, doing precisely the things he wanted to, without ever compromising. And in this way, he and his work have a purity to them. It might seem strange now, but in his day, 35mm color film was really only for those who had time on their hands. Nobody with a deadline could stand to wait for (or afford) the longer turnaround time of slide film. And while this may have all been instinctual for Herzog, how many of us can relate to that beat-of-our-own-drum pleasure of what we now call “street photography,” devoid of deadlines and dependent solely on one’s own fascination and deep presence in a city and moment?
I think this background is important because it places Herzog in an almost-rudimentary place when it comes to photography technique. He is purely about vision; about seeing and composing and, so, for me it is the essence of photography itself. He is everything you can’t learn from YouTube. He is foundational.
There are of course many ways into his 100,000 images and any number of interpretations of his style, but I like to actually remove the subject itself, as well as his incredible use of color, and talk purely about the compositional techniques of his shooting, as I believe that is the most helpful to a photographer. We cannot go back to the 50’s and people are far more reticent to being photographed today than they were in his time, so the things to pull forward, for me, are the ones that still apply, even if you’re shooting today in your own town — of anything.
Perspective

In “Man With Bandage,” one of Herzog’s most famous images, a lot is made of the man and the woman behind him and, indeed, what an incredible moment. I like to notice where he must have been standing to get this image — and why. When you see how the scene recedes in perspective from left to right, you can understand how much perspective plays a role in this. And then, thumbing through the pages of Modern Color you can then notice this technique in so many of Herzog’s other images. There’s very often an angle to his view; it heads off somewhere… it reads. And it’s true whether there’s a street present or not.




The use of perspective as a tool in your photography bag is an important learning. The perspective-d view gives depth. It offers a way to stack subjects and have them hold together in a cohesive way, all part of the same road, or perhaps, as in the case with “CPR Track,” it provides the landscape from which the story emerges.
Early on in my training, I was on a photo walk with a teacher. We stumbled onto a cafe and I asked a gentleman sitting at a sidewalk table if I could photograph him. He agreed. I didn’t think much about where I was standing, so as I pulled the camera up to my eye, I felt the hand of my teacher on my shoulder. He pulled me back and angled me up the street. In that one moment, my trajectory in photography shifted from thinking like a portraitist to thinking like a photographer. I’ve never forgotten the lesson and recognize its power throughout the works of Fred Herzog.
Isolation

What I like about Herzog’s canon of work is that his ways of shooting are very distinct. He employs different techniques depending on the subject and situation. This offers clear direction to students, and is probably why I’ve used his works in my own photography classes. It’s accessible, but also difficult. The foundation of all good endeavors.
Isolation is one of those techniques that seems simple in concept but proves difficult in practice. Of all the approaches to photography that Herzog used, this is one that yielded great results for him, but are rarer to find.
The quintessential image of his that showcases this technique is “Dress in Window,” a straight on image (distinctly not in perspective), with incredible harmony of shape, color and composition. But the draw of the image is the way the dress is isolated in the small frame of the window. Isolation happens in many different ways — sometimes by light, sometimes by object. Finding it and capturing it can be extremely difficult, but you can see throughout his career that Herzog came to master the isolation approach when the opportunity presented itself.




Geometry

One thing about photographers who have been interviewed about their work as many times as Herzog has — they will nearly always be more adept at telling you what attracted them to a single shot than they will be at describing how they compose, and why. I believe this to be true because those things are largely subconscious — or becomes instinctual for a photographer over time. Herzog is no exception here — it’s clear he is drawn to certain scenes because of the color (often red), and it’s also clear that he enjoys things that have timeless qualities to them. He’s discussed the idea that photography works well for things that are used or old, and not as well for things that are new. But there is something prevalent in a large quantity of Herzog’s images that he doesn’t discuss much in interviews — design.

Graphic designers and architects are taught to think on grids. Herzog, whether from his German upbringing, training in medical photography, or something else, seems almost clinically obsessed with the grid in his images. And still, this may have been entirely subconscious for him.
Working on the street of a city, of course, means windows — and windows and buildings are filled with right angles. So, certainly, some amount of grids and geometry are simply an outcome of having made his home on the street. Yet, Herzog seems to find a way to bring geometry in no matter where he is. The photographs on the wall of Main Barber form a classic grid shape, as do many of the walls and billboards of his street scenes. But beyond the presence of geometry is the pure understanding of it, in terms of placement of people, cars, shovels or anything else.




Rule of thirds? Child’s play. Herzog seemed to have an intuitive understanding that filling a frame has a thousand variations and he freely plays jazz with his more geometric compositions. His ability here was as adept as an art director laying out a double page ad and he designed his compositions as intricately as an abstract expressionist. He could go well beyond minimalism in his work, which kept him multi-dimensional — giving his overall work depth, texture and richness — and yet still crop his images in such a way as to give it all a sense of purpose, too.
All of these images are in Modern Color, but the real magic of the book is that there are hundreds more equally well done as every one of these. And yet, upon multiple viewings of the book, something else emerges aside from (or perhaps in conjunction with) his outsized talent: the realization that none of it is traditionally “important.” There are no protests, no essays on marginalized people or discoveries of real America, as Robert Frank and so many others set out to capture. The city and its people here are practically banal in their everyday-ness. The view is often from behind a person, as both photographer and subject appear to stand in one of those lost and fleeting moments of thought, destined to be forgotten and undiscussed. Even when everyone is observing something, as in Airshow, it somehow seems nearly inconsequential. Which only serves to highlight just how hard his type of photography actually is.
Because of this, Modern Color offers far more actual instruction than any other photography book I own. There are no excuses here. I look at the images and I cannot dismiss them for being in classic black and white, for having captured a once-in-a-lifetime event, in the eye of some storm, or for having uncovered some underbelly of humanity, for which nearly any image might have sufficed. No, Herzog did the hardest job in photography: he made everyday life beautiful. He didn’t have big budgets, models or the latest and greatest equipment. Armed nearly solely with pure talent (and love) for the medium, Herzog’s work stands out in the pantheon of Those Who See With Gifted Eyes. Every one of his compositions is available to any photographer who seeks it, and that is as troubling as it is inspiring, for it seems to ask the most difficult question one can pose to a photographer: can you see it?
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