FRED HERZOG and ARNI HARALDSSON in VANCOUVER John Toohey in Her Book on the Beaten Track, Art Critic and Curator Lucy Lippard Ma

FRED HERZOG AND ARNI HARALDSSON IN VANCOUVER John Toohey In her book On the Beaten Track, art critic and curator Lucy Lippard makes a distinction between nostalgia, history and heritage. “Nostalgia, like memory, is personal and subjective; history is purportedly specific; heritage is often concocted, generalized, and idealized.”1 Lippard considers the terms as they relate to tourism, particularly in the ways places are marketed, but her definitions are pertinent to how we respond to photographs, in this case street scenes of Vancouver from the1950s and 1960s by Fred Herzog and a series of Vancouver apartment buildings, built during this same period, and photographed by Arni Haraldsson in the 1990s. Lippard’s definitions are not so fixed that objects, images or places can only belong in one category but within this flexibility lies the problem that the qualities we ascribe to photographs can result in a misreading. Are we really responding to a sophisticated aesthetic, or simply a nostalgic idea of the past? If heritage is “concocted, generalized and idealized,” does it then lead to a false understanding of history? In 2006 Equinox Gallery in Vancouver mounted an exhibition of photographs that Fred Herzog had taken of the city in the 1950s and 1960s.2 The show was promoted as a rediscovery of a lost genius whose works showed an astute but idiosyncratic sense of composition and a radical understanding of colour. Though Herzog was employed professionally as a medical photographer and technical instructor in the Fine Arts Department of the University of British Columbia and had personal associations with Vancouver’s artists, few of his works had been seen by the public up to that point. His relative anonymity therefore allowed for him to be presented as something of a Holy Fool: the innocent who saw what the worldly had missed.3 ARTH 648B-2 Envisioning Digital and Virtual Forms of Exhibitions: The Curatorial Translation of Theory into Practice, 2012 It is the misfortune of rediscovered photographers, particularly if their work was originally personal and private, that while they add to the history of their particular genre they cannot upset it. Whatever the quality of their work, they remain outsiders. In terms of composition and the use of colour, Herzog anticipates the work of American photographers Stephen Shore and William Eggleston by at least a decade yet, because the history has already been written and because his work can obviously make no claim to having influenced theirs, it cannot challenge their eminence – at least for the present.4 The problem is also that in giving Herzog his due place in the history of photography that may end up being contrary to his original intentions for taking the photographs. Herzog has said that although his work was concerned with what Life Magazine has called the ‘human condition’ he was not interested in pursuing photojournalism as an occupation. While he put on slide shows for friends and occasionally took on small commissions for artists, he was apparently happy working full time and regarded the photography he is now famous for as a weekend pastime.5 In photography, the term ‘amateur’ doesn’t have the implications it has in other fields. Originally an amateur photographer was someone who did not operate a commercial studio. Some of the most revered names in 19th century photography, such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Lady Hawarden and Peter Henry Emerson considered themselves amateurs without any connotation that they were less adept than professionals. For Herzog, to be an amateur meant that he was not limited to the structures that magazines like Life required. (Herzog is not unusual in this regard. There have been plenty of photographers who enjoyed the vanity of thinking that working outside of the system protected their integrity.) But if Life, or other sources of popular culture, art history or art criticism do not interpret the work at the time it was created, someone else will. When the exhibition opened at Equinox Gallery what was striking about Herzog’s ARTH 648B-2 Envisioning Digital and Virtual Forms of Exhibitions: The Curatorial Translation of Theory into Practice, 2012 photographs wasn’t just their visual acuity. It was also evident that he had provided a record of Vancouver in the years prior to its redevelopment. Beginning in the 1950s with high-rise residential towers in the West End of Vancouver and reaching a zenith in the 1980s, the transformation of Vancouver not only modernised the urban centre, it provided the city with an entirely new identity.6 Once the hub of British Columbia’s mining and resource industries, the city became a focus for finance, technology and Canada’s foreign trade. Visible signs of modernization included the Skytrain and Expo 86, which had the theme: “Transportation and Communication: World in Motion - World in Touch.” Redevelopment also transformed the city’s demographics and during the 1980s the city became increasingly popular for immigrants from East Asia. For some people, particularly those who can remember an earlier Vancouver, the cost of this regeneration has been not just the replacement of perfectly good buildings of character with bland, unimaginative architecture but the erasure of the city’s heritage, or rather, its marginalization as small pockets were preserved as token gestures.7 We normally use the word nostalgia in the sense of a sentimental regard for the past. Lippard is careful to use the term in its original sense; “severe homesickness – a form of melancholia caused by prolonged absence from one’s country or home.”8 This is precisely the condition that Jeff Wall affects in his introductory essay for the catalogue, Fred Herzog Photographs. “Vancouver in 1950, 1960 or 1970 had a real beauty … Most of that has been swept away. Today, whatever you can say about Vancouver, you cannot say that most of its buildings are gracious and appropriate to their settings.”9 His lament isn’t just that the old city has disappeared but that it didn’t have to. The buildings were still in good condition and the architecture belonged to the landscape. What replaced it was more often ARTH 648B-2 Envisioning Digital and Virtual Forms of Exhibitions: The Curatorial Translation of Theory into Practice, 2012 than not inferior in quality and appearance, and when he says that a photographer like Herzog couldn’t exist today he cannot believe anyone could show the same affection for the city. This sense of nostalgia for the old city is not unique to Vancouver. The 19th century saw the establishment of more cities around the world than the 500 years that preceded it; on the west coast of North America, in Latin America, and all of Australia and New Zealand. These 19th century cities had the advantage of hindsight and were planned to avoid the problems of haphazard construction, congestion and disease that faced the older cities of Europe.10 What the citizens of these modern cities did not have was a deep sense of history. Theirs was too recent. As a result, developers met little resistance, particularly from local and state governments that wanted to present their cities as modern and dynamic. What heritage the city had was consigned to a few old buildings and some plaques noting what was once here. Wall’s jeremiad can be heard from Seattle to Perth and Johannesburg. The removal of history is also the loss of memory and character. But there is a trap in reading Herzog’s photographs that we can easily fall into. Much of what he photographed was itself relatively modern. The neon signs, automobiles and billboards that date and locate his scenes were not old when he photographed them. Whatever his emotional response when he saw them, it was not motivated by nostalgia. This is part of the disjuncture between Herzog’s intentions and our interpretation. It has come about partly because his work was hidden for long enough that when it emerged we feel some entitlement to read it on our terms. What we might be seeing isn’t Vancouver through Herzog’s eyes but our memories or impressions of what we want its history and heritage to be, the concoction and idealization that Lippard refers to. ARTH 648B-2 Envisioning Digital and Virtual Forms of Exhibitions: The Curatorial Translation of Theory into Practice, 2012 In 1993 and 1994, Arni Haraldsson worked the same area Herzog had covered thirty and forty years earlier, photographing tower blocks in Vancouver from the 1950s for his project Modern Apartment Buildings. In that the apartments he focused on were built at the same time Herzog was at work, Haraldsson’s series can be read as a counterpoint to Herzog’s images. Where Herzog is intimate, Haraldsson is distant and detached. While Herzog’s captions rarely identify location, Haraldsson is specific about the building’s name and date of construction. Built on the cusp of Vancouver’s redevelopment surge they can be read as portents of what was to come. The Modern Apartment Buildings series works as a typology, a systematic classification of a particular building type photographed in exactly the same way. Each apartment block fills the frame so there is very little extraneous detail. Haraldsson is playing at being an objective viewer, a scientist categorizing building types without passing judgement. It is clear however from the work that brackets this series, particularly his studies of developments on the outskirts of Vancouver, that Haraldsson regards these apartment buildings as symptomatic of a condition in modern architecture wherein individual identity is subsumed under functionalism. The buildings are different yet they are essentially the same. Haraldsson has argued that the city is now the principal concern for contemporary landscape photographers.11 Most of us are urban dwellers and our most common experience of the landscape is as a site of buildings, roads and other forms of human interference.

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