On First Looking Into Herzog's "Vancouver"

Robson Street never looked so good, yet utterly mundane;

Or Granville Street--that Flaneur in the rain--and Chinatown kids,

A time when women wore matching hats and gloves,

When billboards burst with promises of bigger cars,

And smoother smokes, and more of everything.

Such wild surmise seemed right for Nineteen Fifty-Nine--

So I recall--as in Foot Of Main (page one-0-one):

The city was an empty place for filling up

With more than sunlight, more than rain.

Some other gold now brings us to this place:

Geography's the same, but on the bones glass towers hang;

What lines the shore is someone else's space.

Yet there will always be Untitled here: lonely men at break of day,

Once watchers of the skies, look down to find their way.

                                                                      c. Bruce Dolsen, 2010

Fred Herzog is a Vancouver photographer whose work was featured in a Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition in 2009, and in a book of photographs published to accompany the show. His patient documentation of life in the city's streets and byways over the last fifty years captures the spirit and beauty of ordinary life in a way that contrived, elaborately-conceived wall-sized images of the town fail in all but rendering the sterility of vision of their makers.