Topic: Fred Herzog: Snapshot

[inksmelladdict]

Just stumbled across this documentary. Pretty interesting I thought. Really great photographer.

Snapshot 2: Fred Herzog on Vimeo

[Ezzie]

Lovely character. Well deserved attention he is getting, even this late in the day.

[Late Developer]

What a fantastic bloke.  Just gets on with producing superb photographs and to hell with whether the public likes / doesn't like.  I've heard of him and seen a few pictures of his in recent years but his archive of Kodachrome street photography is fascinating as most street photography of his era was predominantly monochrome. 

[inksmelladdict]

I've got his book and the photographs are amazing. It was entirely worth the money I paid for it. The way he can see how colours work together is just stunning and the way the Kodachrome reproduces them too. I can never understand the snobbery that went along with the b&w versus colour thing. It seems amazing now that more photographers didn't see the potential.

[jharr]

I can never understand the snobbery that went along with the b&w versus colour thing.

I think the snobbery came out of the pictorialist movements of the early 20th century when photographers were trying to distinguish themselves from the snobbery of the "art" community (mainly painters) who saw them as documentarians and not real artists. Black and white was an abstraction of reality, so in that respect it was an 'automatic' step into the artistic realm. Color photography existed in the form of autochromes (among others) and there were those who created very artistic images with it, but for whatever reason, b/w became the de facto standard of artistic photography. It wasn't until Eggleston that color got taken seriously as an artistic photographic medium. It is good to see that Herzog is enjoying some well-deserved success. He is quite an artist.

[Jack Johnson]

I can never understand the snobbery that went along with the b&w versus colour thing.

Though there is some snobbery, I read somewhere that color triggers memory, so black and white invites discovery, investigation, and interpretation.

Probably apocryphal, but interesting. Would be nice to see a modern brain study. And, color didn't hurt the world of painting for the last few thousand years.

(Coming from the man with a box full of FP4+.)

[Urban Hafner]

Thanks for posting this. His shots remind me a bit of the stuff Saul Leiter did in the 50s or 60s.

[Late Developer]

I think it's true to say there was some "snobbery" as it said in the film that colour photography was regarded as vulgar at the time. There was also reference to the fact that black and white was the norm - and a lot cheaper than colour.

IMO, you've just got to admire the guy for sticking to his guns and shooting what he liked shooting, on the medium he enjoyed.

Having seen a lot of colour "street" work by the likes of Joel Meyerowitz and William Klein, I've been a bit ambivalent to whether colour works for that subject.  However, having seen this film and the evidence that colour was a big part of the Vancouver "look" at that point in history, I'm definitely warming to it.

[Francois]

One thing I find is that both color and B&W work on a different timeline.
While a B&W image shot yesterday can be beautiful and stay that way for a long time, a color image shot yesterday needs to age in order to become good.
We don't notice it but the color of society changes over time. It's only after we have forgotten most of them that they become interesting.

It's just like photos with cars. Take a photo with modern cars in it and it will look a bit blah. We see cars everywhere and they all end up looking the same; the same as in ugly. But put the photo in a shoe box for twenty years and it becomes an interesting artifact in its own right.

[oldwino]

I love that in so many of his photos, color seems to be the subject.

[Aksel]

Thanks for sharing, truly inspirational!