Whispers and Shadows is an intimate selection of color photographs made by Fred Herzog in Vancouver 1959 – 1989.  Although these images make up a detailed visual record of the city and its transitions, they transcend those very details to become an elegiac musing on the nature of humanity itself. 

Whispers and Shadows will focus on photographs whose context derives from those things that make a city alive--neon signs, billboards, shop windows and the crowds of people who inhabit it. Signs for Coca-Cola, 7-up and Pepsi abound, as well as neon everywhere. Pictures of Nixon, Eisenhower, even Lucille Ball crop in various places, loud, vibrant and fun. But the strength of these pictures is that they are about more than Vancouver, that they relate to the place inside all of us that is recognizable, that is home. Crossing Powell, in which a lone man enters a lighted crosswalk accompanied only by his shadow while three other men quietly converse in front of a dilapidated storefront, is a singular image that seems to describe the world that Fred Herzog has created, one in which solitude and company, electricity and darkness, shadow and substance exist in a place that is universally familiar.

Fred Herzog was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1930 and immigrated to Canada in 1952. Though he has been making photographs of the urban landscape in Vancouver for decades, his pictures have only recently been brought to a larger public. A major retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2007 was a revelation to those who had known his work only through slides, as well as to a generation of art lovers who had not heard of him at all.  Whispers and Shadows marks Herzog's second solo show at Laurence Miller Gallery.