Walks with Fred Herzog

The friendship between Bruce Stewart and Fred Herzog began because of a mutual love of photography and went onto span half-a-century.

Bruce Stewart has been documenting Vancouver ever since his father gave him a reflex camera for his eleventh birthday. A few years later, he started an after-school job at the Department of Biomedical Communications at UBC working with legendary photographer Fred Herzog. He already had a love of photography, Fred just helped it along. Their friendship spanned half-a-century and much of it involved photos.

Capturing Everyday life:

Bruce has thousands—photos of Easter Be-ins, the PNE midway, Kits Beach, the canneries of Steveston, Vancouver Island and Washington State. The ones I love the most are of everyday life—what Herzog called “pristine squalor.”

“Fred got me very interested in the sociological side of photography and things that never occurred to me to be photographed,” says Bruce. “I guess you might say Fred opened my eyes to the world through photography.”

While Bruce would pack a couple of cameras and several lenses, Fred often arrived with one camera and one lens. “Fred would say I’m just going to look at everything through a 55 mm lens today or an 85 portrait lens or a 24 mm wide angle lens. I want to see the world in a certain way today,” says Bruce. “And that taught me something as well. Prepare to see things in a certain way through a certain trajectory and a certain lens.”

Perspective:

I asked Bruce to explain what he meant through one of his photos and he told me about a day back in the early ‘70s when he and Fred were wandering around the DTES. Bruce came across a rundown storefront with a man’s arm pulling back a curtain, his hand resting on a beat-up sofa. He took a black and white picture and then went in closer until he was about three feet from the man’s elbow. Fred saw what Bruce was doing and took a similar shot in colour. It became one of Fred’s best-selling photos.

“Many times, Fred’s ideas would inform mine and sometimes my ideas would inform his.”

Bruce sent me several photos he’d taken of Fred while they were out on their walks.

One is a fabulous shot of Fred taking a photo of a gas pump at an abandoned garage in the West End. Bruce says he didn’t notice the Jesus Saved sign until he was developing the photo.

Unconscious art:

There’s the photo of Fred taking a photo of the soft drink labels on Powell Street.

“This was an amazing display of unconscious art,” says Bruce. “It’s also a dandy exploration of Fred’s shooting stances because it gives you a sense of how Fred took pictures, how he braced himself, the angle that he used, the kind of lens that he used, and it gave a sense of lighting.”

Often, they would take very different photos of the same person, place or event.

One is an antique store on East Hastings.

“Fred was always looking at antiques and the way people place things in store windows. He had a whole series on store windows and the whimsy and the innocent art that was created through the juxtaposition of odds and sods in a display window. And that’s where we both tried to outdo each other trying to get the whackiest combination of things.”

Unfinished business:

There’s a wonderful photo of Bruce taking a photo of Fred taking a photo of a group of laughing Asian kids at Hawks Grocery at East Georgia in 1969. Bruce’s photo sans Herzog was featured in an exhibit called Unfinished Business: Vancouver Street Photographers 1955 to 1985 at Presentation House Gallery in 2003. Karen Stanley recognized herself in the photo and wrote to Bruce to tell him she now has a teenage daughter.

The photo of Fred pointing to a boat on a mosaic was taken outside the Admiral Hotel on Hastings Street in Burnaby.

My hope is that more of Bruce’s wonderful photos of a long-gone Vancouver and some of his 400 canvasses will make their way out of his Vancouver Island basement and into a book or books, or at the very least a website.

related:

• More Photos of Kitsilano in the 1970s and ’80s
• Kitsilano in the ’70s: a photo essay
• The Nanaimo to Kitsilano Bathtub Race
• The Dollarton Pleasure Faire
• The Evolution of Devonian Harbour Park
• The Day the Bridge Fell Down

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