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Born in Germany, Fred Herzog came to Vancouver in 1953 and worked as a medical photographer from 1957 to 1990. He first picked up a camera in 1950, and was encouraged by his friend Ferro Marincowitz to take up medical photography. He volunteered at hospitals and eventually landed a job at St. Paul's Hospital and then UBC. Since then, he has produced a substantial body of photographs, shooting urban life in Vancouver - second-hand shops, vacant lots, neon signage and the crowds of people who have populated the city's streets. Almost all of work was produced on Kodachrome, a colour slide film that was difficult to work with in a spontaneous fashion. In retrospect, shooting in colour was a brilliant idea: the colour on Kodachrome transparencies is amazingly rich. Herzog's use of colour was unusual in the 1950s and 60s, a time when art photography was almost exclusively associated with black and white imagery.
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