BIOGRAPHY
Fred Herzog was born in 1930 in Bad Friedrichshall, Wurttemberg, Germany. He spent his childhood in Stuttgart but returned to his birth city in 1946. He had begun to take outdoor photographs in black and white in Germany but began serious photography after emigrating to Canada in 1952. He lived in Toronto for a year and then moved to Vancouver in 1953, where he has lived ever since. In that same year, he took his first colour photograph in the Downtown East Side, a part of the city in which he continues to photograph at the age of 82.
In the late 50s and for the next 30 years, he worked as a medical photographer, eventually becoming the Head of the Photo Division of the Department of Biomedical Communications at the University of British Columbia, in which position he was responsible for a staff of sixty employees. Beginning in 1967 he taught photography seminars at both UBC and Simon Fraser University. In 1969 he received a Canada Council Grant and began working with the N.E. Thing Co. on the photographs for its project called Piles. In that same year he participated in Extensions, a group show which went to the National Gallery in Ottawa and subsequently toured across Canada.
He first exhibited his photographs in 1966 but prior to his retirement from the Biomedical Communications Department, his exhibition history was sporadic. That changed in the 90s when he began to exhibit consistently in Vancouver at Presentation House, the Belkin Gallery and the Vancouver Art Gallery. He has since shown in Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto, New York and in Germany. In addition to exhibiting in public institutions, he is represented by the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver, Trepanier Baer in Calgary and the Laurence Miller Gallery in New York. In the last three years there have been a number of catalogues and books published on his lengthy and extraordinary career as a pioneer in the use of colour photography. Mr. Herzog, who continues to live and work in Vancouver, became a Canadian citizen in 1959.