If you've spent any time with film, the name Kodachrome probably makes you pause. That color. The slide film where reds ran especially deep and even the shadows felt a little warm.
Now tell someone there was a guy walking the back alleys of 1950s Vancouver with Kodachrome, and the first answer you usually get is "Okay, so who's that?" Fred Herzog. A photographer who spent almost his whole life unknown, until the world finally noticed him well past seventy.
After Work, He Hit the Streets
He was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1930. He lost both parents to the war, and in 1952, at twenty-two, he moved to Canada. The city he settled in the next year was Vancouver, and he lived there for the rest of his life.
Surprisingly, he didn't pay the bills as an art photographer. He was a medical photographer at a hospital, recording surgeries and wounds, about as far from romance as work gets. The real photographs came after hours and on weekends, a camera over his shoulder as he roamed the city. For a few years from 1968 he also taught in the art departments at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia, but his day job stayed at the hospital to the end.
Color Was the Subject
He didn't point his camera at the kind of scenery that ends up in museums. Neon signs, used car lots, gas stations, cheap diners, people waiting for the bus after work. The ordinary skin of a city that nobody back then would have called "art."
Add Kodachrome's particular color, and it becomes a different story. The red reflections on rain-soaked asphalt, the glow of shop windows, the saturation of people's coats. In Herzog's pictures, color wasn't decoration. It was the subject itself. In an era when black and white was treated as the respectable art, he stubbornly kept collecting the colors of the street.
He liked photographing people, too. An old man on Main Street, even a corner of his own rented room. No big events. He aimed his camera at the faces and places you pass every day.
Why Did Kodachrome Look Like That?
A quick detour into film. Kodachrome was a color reversal film, in other words a slide film, released in 1935. What set it apart from every other color film was the way it made color.
Most color films carry their color couplers inside the emulsion from the start. Kodachrome's emulsion, by contrast, was basically three layers of black-and-white emulsion. The color came not at the moment of exposure but in processing, through Kodak's own proprietary method of re-exposing each layer and adding dye. So your neighborhood lab couldn't touch it. Only a handful of dedicated labs around the world could develop it.
It was fussy, but it paid you back. The grain was fine, the sharpness high, and above all the dyes stayed stable for a long time, so the colors barely faded even after decades. The slides Herzog shot in the '50s still had their original colors in the 2000s purely because of that stubborn durability. Hold on to that. It comes back later.
Twenty Years Ahead, and Invisible
He started shooting the streets in color in 1953. William Eggleston set off the "can color be art?" debate with his show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976, and Stephen Shore came out with color in the '70s too. Herzog had been standing on the street with color film a good twenty years before them. So why did nobody know?
The answer, a little cruelly, was inside the very medium he loved. Kodachrome is a positive, a slide. Project it on a wall and the color comes alive, but with the technology of the time it was practically impossible to make a print that carried a slide's color over faithfully. Museums and galleries wanted prints to hang on the wall. What Herzog had was a pile of slides that only showed their true color when projected. The work was already shot. There was just no way to turn it into something the world could hang up.
Late Light, Brought by the Scanner
Rescue came, of all places, from digital. In the 2000s, as film scanning and archival pigment (inkjet) printing matured, it finally became possible to put Kodachrome's color on paper almost exactly. Slides that had slept in drawers for decades at last became prints and went up on walls. This is where that Kodachrome durability pays off. Because the color hadn't faded, light from half a century earlier was printed just as it was.
In 2007 the Vancouver Art Gallery gave him a retrospective. Herzog was already seventy-seven. The response was huge, and the show went on to Paris, New York, Berlin and Toronto. In 2010 he received an honorary doctorate from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and in 2014 the Audain Prize, Canada's lifetime achievement award for the visual arts. A lifetime of obscurity, and then all the recognition arrived at once.
The Tool's Time, the Person's Time
As someone who shoots film, what sticks with me about this story is how the fate of a tool drags the fate of a person along with it. Herzog wasn't lazy, and he didn't lack talent. The film he chose just didn't keep time with the printing technology of his era. Kodachrome was discontinued in 2009, and when the last lab closed it passed fully into history. And yet the work that proved its color most persistently only came before the world just as the film was starting to disappear. The order of things got turned completely around.
Herzog died in September 2019, at eighty-eight. Thankfully, he lived long enough to see his pictures on the walls and to watch people stop in front of that red. "Good photographs get recognized eventually" sounds too romantic, and I don't usually buy it. In front of Herzog, though, I want to believe it at least once. Just remember that "eventually" took fifty years, and that what sped it up wasn't a critic. It was a scanner and an inkjet.
