The Old Days
‘New World Confectionery’, 1965 - courtesy of the estate of Fred Herzog
The photographs of Fred Herzog, mainly dating from the 1950s and 1960s, are regarded with great affection in Canada, and especially in Vancouver, where he lived and worked. Herzog’s first major exhibition took place in 2007 at the Vancouver Art Gallery; his images, taken in spare time, had previously been shown only in occasional group shows and at camera clubs. As often happens, the slide film he used had deteriorated badly, and it was digital technology that rescued the photos for the museum exhibition. A medical photographer by profession, Herzog liked to wander around the city on foot, using a small camera to make informal images of streets, passers-by, shopfronts, and unglamorous neighbourhoods, both commercial and residential. After the show he became well-known, admired by critics and by many of those who remembered the places he had photographed; in a later interview, Herzog remarked that ‘people came in and broke into tears because they recognised a city they had forgotten existed’. He loved Vancouver, and yet, as the writer and curator David Campany has observed, Herzog’s view of the place was neither obviously positive nor negative, but ‘the measured, attentive and ultimately generous view of a mindful observer’. Even in a country that has a large proportion of immigrants, Herzog, born in Germany, remained something of an outsider.
Herzog liked the ‘grittiness’ and vitality of old Vancouver, then more obviously a port and frontier town, and his plain and evocative photos now read as elegiac images of a lost era in which people acted and lived differently, and where the streetscapes, while often rundown and melancholic, had undoubted character. Jeff Wall, who lives in Vancouver and is one of Canada’s best-known contemporary photographic artists, has said that Herzog’s vision would be impossible today, because the city he loved no longer exists. Campany agrees but puts it more dramatically, suggesting that Vancouver has been transformed ‘in ways that were unconsciously cynical and dispiriting. The kinds of architecture, informal social spaces, and layers of material history to which Fred Herzog was drawn have been swept aside. In their place came a dense and homogeneous landscape determined by raw capital, and insensitive to its inhabitants’.
In the 1960s, just as Herzog was documenting Vancouver, the English photographer Edwin Smith took some beautiful images of Ireland, predominantly in monochrome. The consequent book sold extremely well, its popularity, both at home and abroad, confirming that it was accepted as a sympathetic and expressive portrayal of the country. Today, however, Smith’s Ireland has more or less been forgotten, possibly because his photos, not quite old enough to be historic, are no longer reflective of the nation’s current self-image and aspirations. The book’s essay, written by Micheál MacLiammóir, the celebrated actor who was born Alfred Willmore in Willesden, London, is now equally incongruous. Notwithstanding its mellifluous tone, the piece included some surprisingly sharp observations about his adopted country, which almost certainly would not be welcome today. Like Herzog in Vancouver, both Smith and MacLiammóir were outsiders.
While Herzog’s reputation has slowly come to the fore in recent years, Smith’s has receded. This is partly due to fashion; describing himself as ‘an architect by training, a painter by inclination and a photographer by necessity’, Smith had much in common with 19th century photographic pictorialism, an approach that is currently out of favour. His work now appears somewhat dated, its aesthetics soft-centred, for as well as sensitively documenting architecture (a vast number of his photographs were given, after his death, to the Royal Institute of British Architects in London), Smith liked to represent benign aspects of the traditional ways of life that were still to be found in mid-20th century Britain and Ireland. Many of his more resonant images contain signs and traces of human presence, their implied narratives suggesting further layers of meaning. Photographing what he appreciated about the past and ignoring what he disliked in the present, Smith was unapologetic about his style and taste, which reflected a love of nature, the celebration of regional diversity, and the belief that all culture is rooted in historical time and place. These themes were dominant in his Irish photographs.
As in Vancouver, Dublin and the Irish countryside have been heartlessly and efficiently developed, and even though many of the views in Ireland could be reproduced today, their context has been recast, probably irrevocably. From time to time there are protests and grumbles about the effects of modernisation in Ireland, but Irish nostalgia is much less obvious than it was half a century ago. This may change, though. In 2020 one of the country’s best-selling books was Old Ireland in Colour, a selection of old and antique photographs that have been digitally ‘colourised’, and in the wake of its success a second volume was produced this year. The impact of the transformation is unarguable, and although some images look as staged as historical film stills, others are uncannily immediate and lifelike. The ‘colourisation’ process itself, however, raises some interesting questions. Is it artistically or academically acceptable to alter old images in such a radical way, and was it possible to do so on this occasion only because most of the photographers are not around to object? Is the apparent ‘authenticity’ of the new images simply an illusion, a form of manipulation? Like our feelings about ‘the old days’, the photographs in Old Ireland in Colour are more complex and contradictory than they first appear.
For further exploration:
Fred Herzog
https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2019/09/13/Fred-Herzog-Vancouver-Beloved-Photographer-Life-Death/
Edwin Smith
https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/exhibitions/curating-identity-edwin-smiths-photography
https://www.apollo-magazine.com/review-ordinary-beauty-photography-edwin-smith-riba/
Old Ireland in Colour
Ardare, Co. Donegal, by Edwin Smith, courtesy of RIBA