“Addicts, Crooks, and Drunks”: Reimagining Vancouver’s Skid Road through the Photography of Fred Herzog, 1957–70 Tara Ng A Thesis in The Department of Art History Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (Art History) at Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada April 2016 © Tara Ng, 2016 CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY School of Graduate Studies This is to certify that the thesis prepared By: Tara Ng Entitled: “Addicts, Crooks, and Drunks”: Reimagining Vancouver’s Skid Road through the Photography of Fred Herzog, 1957–70 and submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Art History) complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respect to originality and quality. Signed by the final Examining Committee: _____________________________________ Chair _____________________________________Examiner Dr. Catherine MacKenzie _____________________________________Examiner Dr. Cynthia Hammond _____________________________________Supervisor Dr. Martha Langford Approved By ______________________________ Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim Graduate Program Director ________________2016 ______________________________ Rebecca Taylor Duclos Dean of Faculty of Fine Arts iii Abstract “Addicts, Crooks, and Drunks”: Reimagining Vancouver’s Skid Road through the Photography of Fred Herzog, 1957–70 Tara Ng This thesis explores how Canadian artist Fred Herzog’s (b. 1930) empathetic photographs of unattached, white, working-class men living on Vancouver’s Skid Road in the 1950s and 1960s contest dominant newspaper representations. Herzog’s art practice is framed as a sociologically- oriented form of flânerie yielding original, nuanced, and critical images that transcend the stereotypes of the drunk, the criminal, the old-age pensioner, and the sexual deviant on Skid Road. I apply Critical Discourse Analysis to newspaper articles published in the Vancouver Sun and the Province between 1950 and 1970 to uncover how newspaper discourse produced and reproduced the socioeconomic marginalization of men on Skid Road. Through a comparative analysis, this thesis shows how Herzog’s photographs challenge dominant newspaper discourse in the following ways: by expanding the Skid Road discourse to allow the possibility of positive subject-positions; by demonstrating a dialectical rather than causal relationship between masculinity and space; and by exposing the ways in which the supposedly deviant sexual practices of men on Skid Road in fact stemmed from the hegemonic capitalist and patriarchal structures of Western society. Drawing on feminist, social, and Neo-Marxian class theories, this study not only deconstructs dominant perspectives but also gives visibility to alternative ones, thereby underscoring working-class subjectivities and uncovering the ways in which working- class masculinity on Skid Road both defied and conformed to hegemonic masculinity in the postwar period. iv Acknowledgements It has been a tremendous privilege to have Dr. Martha Langford as my thesis supervisor, and I thank her for her critical insight and constant encouragement as my thesis developed in unexpected directions. My sincerest thanks to my reader, Dr. Catherine MacKenzie, for her thoughtful feedback, which has greatly enriched my thesis. I would also like to thank Dr. Cynthia Hammond and Dr. Steven Stowell for their comments and suggestions, and the rest of the members of the Faculty of Fine Arts for their support, especially Dr. Loren Lerner. I am deeply grateful to Concordia University for granting me a Graduate Student Mobility Award. It would have been impossible to write this thesis without the research that I was able to complete in Vancouver as a result of this grant. I would like to thank Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim for helping me organize my research trip, and Jessa Alston-O’Connor for giving me an illuminating tour of the Downtown Eastside. Thank you to Keith Mitchell and Susan Sirovyak for arranging my visit to the Vancouver Art Gallery. Many thanks to the staff at the Vancouver Public Library for their assistance in locating the Library’s collection of newspaper articles on Skid Road. Finally, a million thanks to my exceedingly generous family and friends: Teresa Ng, Sam Ng, Sharon Ng Hayes, Geoff Hayes, Austin Hayes, Derek Lall, Chris Bondy, Sammy Chiu, Sheri De Vries, Matt Oh, Erica Suh, Andreu Vilalta Freixa, Mark Mai, Noelia Gravotta, and Paula Petsoulakis. v Table of Contents List of Figures vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Fred Herzog: Actor and Flâneur 16 Herzog: A Biography 17 Herzog’s Place within the History of Street Photography 20 Herzog’s Street Photography as Flânerie 26 The Flâneur as an Observer 34 The Flâneur as a Reader 36 The Flâneur as a Producer 40 Chapter 2: The Drunk, the Criminal, and the Old-Age Pensioner 43 Hegemonic Masculinity 44 Hegemony and Newspaper Discourse 47 “Vancouver’s Shame”: Newspaper Discourse on Skid Road 50 The Drunk 52 Herzog’s Representations of Leisure on Skid Road 60 The Criminal 78 Herzog’s “Engagingly Seedy” Vancouver 82 The Old-Age Pensioner 86 Loitering and the “Disorderly Vitality of the Street” 90 Chapter 3: Skid Road: “The Beat of Pickup Women” 96 Normative Sexuality 97 The History of Prostitution on Skid Road 98 “The Beat of Pickup Women”: Prostitution in Newspaper Discourse on Skid Road 102 The Prostitute and the Fashion Mannequin 107 The Commodification and Sexualization of Women in Postwar Popular Culture 112 Pornography and the Skid Road Barbershop 114 Playboy and the Consumption-Oriented Bachelor 117 Pornography in Herzog’s Self-Representations 121 Conclusion 125 Bibliography 128 vi List of Figures Fig. 1. “The area (darker pattern) that civic officials called skid row in the late 1950s and early 1960s.” Reproduced from Jeff Sommers, “Men at the Margin: Masculinity and Space in Downtown Vancouver, 1950–1986,” Urban Geography 19, no. 4 (1998): 293. Fig. 2. Fred Herzog, West End from Burrard Bridge, 1957. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). Fig. 3. Fred Herzog, Untitled (Hastings and Columbia Street, Vancouver), 1958, chromogenic print, 86.8 x 60.4 cm, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). Fig. 4. Fred Herzog, Second Hand Shop Cordova St., 1961. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). Fig. 5. Fred Herzog, U.R. Next, 1959. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). Fig. 6. Fred Herzog, My Room Harwood Street, 1958. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). Fig. 7. Fred Herzog, Main Barber, 1968. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). Fig. 8. Fred Herzog, Main Barber from Sidewalk, 1968. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). Fig. 9. Fred Herzog, Reader Spruce, 1959. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). Fig. 10. Fred Herzog, Bookshop Main, 1963. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). Fig. 11. Fred Herzog, Shopper, 1962. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). Fig. 12. Fred Herzog, Man and Tabloids, 1966. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). Fig. 13. Fred Herzog, Newspaper Readers, 1961. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). Fig. 14. Fred Herzog, Robson Street, 1957. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). vii Fig. 15. Fred Herzog, Man with Bandage, 1968. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). Fig. 16. Fred Herzog, Squatter—Railroad Tracks, 1961. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). Fig. 17. Fred Herzog, Waterfront Flaneur, 1959. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). Fig. 18. Fred Herzog, Bargain Shop, 1962. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). Fig. 19. Fred Herzog, Barber, 1967. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). Fig. 20. Fred Herzog, Studio, 1959. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). Fig. 21. Fred Herzog, Self-Portrait, 1961. Reproduced from Douglas Coupland et al., Fred Herzog: Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011). 1 Introduction Canadian artist Fred Herzog (b. 1930) began photographing the streets and residents of downtown Vancouver in 1957.1 His archive of more than 100,000 images has been described by Vancouver-based curator Bill Jeffries as “the single greatest Vancouver photographic document.”2 In the late 1950s and 1960s, Herzog spent much of his spare time recording the city’s working-class neighbourhoods, which today are situated in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.3 He explains his attraction to these communities thusly: