The Photographer Behind the Camera: Fred Herzog and Photographing What's Actually There

Every photographer eventually asks the same question: whose work should I be learning from, and how do I actually learn from it rather than just admiring it. This entry looks at a photographer who spent decades documenting his own city with no audience at all, using film considered too ordinary to be taken seriously.

Who he was

Fred Herzog was born in Germany in 1930, immigrated to Canada in 1952, and settled in Vancouver the following year, where he worked as a medical photographer by profession. In his evenings and weekends, over several decades, he photographed the city's working-class neighborhoods, storefronts, and street life on Kodachrome slide film, a consumer-grade color film associated with home photography rather than serious art. His work went almost entirely unrecognized until his mid-seventies, when a 2007 exhibition finally brought his archive to public attention. He died in 2019.

What actually made his work identifiable

He used ordinary film, dismissed by the art world of his time.

Kodachrome was seen as amateur, home-slideshow material, not a medium for serious photography, which was still assumed to mean black and white. Herzog used it anyway, for decades, regardless of what that choice cost him in recognition.

He photographed the ordinary commercial city, not staged scenes.

His subjects were storefronts, signage, everyday people on the street, working-class neighborhoods before they changed. Nothing dramatic or arranged, simply the visible, unremarkable texture of a city going about its day.

He worked for decades without an audience.

He kept photographing consistently for years with no exhibition, no recognition, and seemingly no expectation that anyone beyond himself would see the work. The practice itself, not the reception, was what sustained it.

The exercise: practice the technique, not the equipment

This works with any camera, including a phone. The point is not the equipment, and definitely not needing "serious" gear. It is paying attention to what's ordinarily overlooked.

1. Go somewhere unremarkable.

Pick a street or area near you that you'd never think to call photogenic: a commercial strip, a row of storefronts, an ordinary intersection. Not a scenic spot. Somewhere genuinely everyday.

2. Let signage and color be the subject.

Photograph a storefront, a sign, a painted surface, treating its color and typography as the actual subject of the frame, not just background detail.

3. Photograph people going about ordinary business.

Someone waiting, someone working, someone walking past. Not a dramatic moment. Just what's actually happening.

4. Return to the same area more than once.

Go back to the same street or neighborhood on a different day. Notice what stays the same and what's changed. This is closer to how Herzog actually worked, building a body of work about a place over time, not in a single outing.

5. Don't shoot for an audience.

Treat at least one full session as if no one will ever see the results. Notice whether that changes what you choose to photograph.

What this exercise is not

This is not an attempt to make you photograph like Fred Herzog, and it will not teach you to see the way he saw. That came from his own patience and decades of unrecognized, undeterred practice, and none of that transfers through a single exercise. What transfers is a specific, practicable habit: taking the ordinary, overlooked, everyday city seriously as a subject, regardless of whether anyone else is watching.

Mimicking a technique is a way of building vocabulary. Whether anything resembling your own style comes out of that practice is still entirely up to you.