Modern Color

Photographer Fred Herzog releases a volume that reminds audiences just how pioneering his colour work was. Oliver Atwell takes a look

- Fred Herzog

There are always firsts – it’s just that in some fields there seem to be more firsts than others. That’s especially true of photography, a medium that has a history of ‘pioneers’ in single fields. Colour photography is a good example. The real pioneer of the medium seems to change depending on whom you ask (most people, perhaps rightly, would say William Eggleston) but let’s allow some space for another name: Fred Herzog.

Herzog’s work has much in common with William Eggleston, who eschewed big scenes in favour of the quotidian. It was through focusing on the everyday in the US that Eggleston was able to reveal the deeper truths of the world. Scenes of society in the macrocosm, rather than showing us nothing, showed us everything: race relations, urban alienation, gender politics and class distinctions.

Herzog’s images, taken in Canada, do much the same. ‘Content cannot be manufactured, in my opinion,’ Herzog says. ‘That which I can find is better than that which you can make. That which we find, the work and the use of the people out there, it’s natural, that’s what ordinary people do, that interests me.’

In his work, we’re shown a world we recognise, anachronistic as some of it may be, yet we relate to it. Despite slight shifts in social, cultural and technological parameters, the world now looks much the same as it did in the ’60s and ’70s.