When Vancouver Was Technicolor
Fred Herzog first glimpsed the city he’d spend a lifetime documenting when he was 14. It was 1944, and bombs were levelling his hometown of Stuttgart, Germany. He was flipping through a geography textbook at school when he landed on a photograph of Vancouver’s waterfront, boats bobbing in the harbour. He had never seen the ocean and knew that was where he wanted to seek adventure. At 22 years old, he signed up as one of the bustling port city’s many seamen. When a medical photography gig materialized three years later, he traded the sea for the shutter and, back on shore, photographed the city too.
The Vancouver in Herzog’s viewfinder was packed and vibrant. Leica in hand, he paced a favourite path through Strathcona and East Hastings. Back in the ’50s, the Downtown Eastside was the city’s cultural hub, spilling over with theatres, restaurants and clubs that bled into neighbouring Chinatown. Herzog was captivated by the everyday, shooting on colour film with his camera at hip level to keep people from noticing it. “When people see you, the picture’s gone for good,” he once said. He filled up boxes of film slides with images of crowded downtown streets, passersby lingering in doorways, advertisements in shop windows and neon signs. He eventually shot 100,000 colour photos at a time when that medium was usually reserved for advertising—even the National Gallery in Ottawa only accepted black-and-white images. Herzog’s fascination with the gritty realism of Vancouver’s streetscapes may have begun as a hobby, but it earned him a place among the early pioneers of colour street photography.
By the time of his death in 2019, the neighbourhoods he’d loved had faded from their mid-century glory. The 1993 closure of the iconic Woodward’s department store, which had served the Downtown Eastside since 1903, sparked a spate of other business shutdowns. Hastings Street emptied out. Meanwhile, the neighbourhood grappled with a rising wave of hard drug use, chased by a surge of crime. Now, six years after Herzog’s death, his estate executor—the gallerist Andy Sylvester—is staging an exhibit of Herzog’s pioneering work. Sylvester recruited Carol Lee, the chair and co-founder of the Vancouver Chinatown Foundation, to curate the show.
Lee believes that development should uplift residents rather than displace them. Sylvester saw in her a unique ability to put Herzog’s chronicle of the neighbourhood’s past in conversation with its future. “We see the Downtown Eastside as a place of despair, but it was once hopeful with a lot of vitality,” Lee says. “What would it take for us to get back to that point?” Her selections are displayed in Vitality: Fred Herzog Photographs In and Around Chinatown, which runs at Vancouver’s Equinox Gallery until May 10. The show frames 60 of Herzog’s pictures as an optimistic window into what Chinatown, Strathcona and the Downtown Eastside once were—and what they can be again. Below, Sylvester and Lee share the stories behind some of the exhibit’s photos.
Hub & Lux, 1958: “When Fred arrived, he was attracted to the neighbourhoods where workers like himself would congregate. Many of these areas were full of extravagant neon business signs, which Vancouver was famous for. By the ’70s, the city’s administration wanted to get rid of them—to some people, the neon aesthetic clashed with Vancouver’s natural beauty. A few were saved and remain in the Vancouver Museum today, but the frontal signage that replaced them simply doesn’t have the same electric personality.” —Sylvester
Man With Cane, 1961: “Ho Sun Hing Co. was Canada’s first Chinese print shop, founded in 1908 by a railroad cook, Lap Tong Lam. In the ’40s and ’50s, Lam ran Vancouver’s most technologically advanced presses, producing brochures, newspapers and menus for Chinese restaurants nationwide. His family operated the print shop for more than a century, until it closed in 2014.” —Lee
Bogner’s Grocery, 1960: “If you grew up in Vancouver in the 1950s and ’60s, you probably had a corner store down the street. Those shops had an abundance of advertising, especially by pop companies. These kids probably knew each other; they’d go to the local store to buy candy or soft drinks, or maybe pick something up for their parents. During this period, the city was much poorer, and you can see that a lot of kids and their families were working class by the clothing they had on.” —Sylvester
Peter’s Coffee Bar, 1958: “This building, which opened in 1901, has an apartment opening into Shanghai Alley, which, together with the nearby Canton Alley, once housed more than 500 residents. Early Chinese immigrants lived here because they faced hostility and discrimination from other neighbourhoods. Despite these conditions, Chinatown was a bustling place. There were several businesses: a theatre, a grocer, a barber.” —Lee
Two Women in Coats, 1968: “Fred loved this tender image of two women: the aesthetic of the pink and blue, the friendship as they look at these celebrity pictures together. Back then, if people wanted to know what was going on in Hong Kong or China but couldn’t afford newspapers, merchants would simply allow the public to read them by looking into the shop window. The connection between owners and passersby was generous and created a communal bond on the street.” —Sylvester
Kue Lock, 1960: “Growing up, I remember seeing all of these older men in Chinatown eating by themselves. Beginning in the late 1880s, a lot of Chinese men came to Canada to work on projects such as railroads, but the Chinese Exclusion Act made it hard for Chinese women to join them. So Chinatown became a huge bachelor society. I had a number of uncles like that—I didn’t realize that was why they were single. It was a subject my family and I never really discussed.” —Lee
Foot of Main, 1968: “The streets are often bustling in Fred’s photos. It was unusual, especially at that moment in Vancouver’s history, for Main Street to be so deserted. In this photo, there’s only one couple stepping off the sidewalk onto a vast expanse of pavement, almost as if they were stepping into the ocean.” —Sylvester
Black Man Pender, 1958: “Fred photographed this storefront many times. That gentleman—and, we presume, his daughter, with the dog—were walking through, and he was standing in the right place at the right moment to capture this split-second image. It’s a lovely moment. And for Fred, the shadow of the man, projected on the wall by the early-morning or late-afternoon light, is important. He used that aesthetic in many of his works.” —Sylvester
Hastings at Columbia, 1958: “Hastings Street is now a pretty rough part of town, but back then, as you can see from the thickness of the crowd, it was a jovial place of commerce and conversation. Fred was able to capture the character of the moment and the personalities of the people on the street, whether that’s the lady with the sunglasses or the fellow with the stitched sweater. In this picture, Hastings feels like it’s full of energy, like you could easily find something to do there.” —Sylvester
Magazine Man, 1959: “Fred loved to read. He photographed readers everywhere: in Chinatown, on Main Street, in libraries. The man sitting in the window is probably the proprietor of this magazine store, completely consumed by the periodical or comic book he’s reading. The quality of light in the photo is beautiful—you can see the warm glow of the Coca-Cola vending machine in the back, as well as the bubblegum machines to the left.” —Sylvester
Main Barber, 1968: “In the 1950s and ’60s, B.C.’s thriving forestry industry meant that there were lots of sawmills within city limits—and, as a result, a blanket of smog. That’s what creates the thick, beautiful, soft sense of light. It’s a merge of fog and smoke. Here, you see the inside of a barbershop where everything is off—the calendar is wrong, the clocks are wrong. The shop seems to exist outside of time.” —Sylvester
Crossing Powell 2, 1984: “Kodachrome, an early type of colour film, used to be very expensive to process—it had to be shipped to Eastern or Central Canada, sometimes even outside the country. So Fred had to become technically inventive. He studied the quality of light at this corner to capture the woman’s image and shadow, both projecting toward the viewer.” —Sylvester
