Over the weekend, I went to the Vancouver Art Gallery to see some major photographic exhibitions that were on there.

The first, that started on February 3rd, was entitled "Acting the Part: Photography as Theatre" which examined the art of "staged" photographs from the year 1840 until the present time. After attending this exhibition, I did a bit of research and came up with the concept of tableau vivant which gives one a better idea of the concept. While I thought it interesting, I couldn't help thinking that I would have enjoyed it more if my friend "T" (otherwise know as "maxime") were to have been there. He has a much more theatrical sense than I do.

The second exhibition, Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs, was much more to my liking. It covers over 40 years of photographs taken by Fred Herzog, an immigrant to Canada from Germany who, in this collection, documented the city of Vancouver over almost 50 years of its growth into the metropolis that it has become. His work was both nostalgic but also demonstrates some amazing techniques.

Much of Herzog’s work was produced on Kodachrome, a colour slide film that was difficult to work with in a spontaneous fashion. Herzog’s use of colour was unusual in the 1950s and 60s, a time when art photography was almost exclusively associated with black and white imagery. In this respect, his photographs can be seen as a pre-figuration of the “New Colour” of photographers such as Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, which received widespread acclaim in the 1970s, and the work of contemporary Vancouver photographers such as Roy Arden, Arni Haraldsson, Karin Bubas and Christos Dikeakos.

I preferred this second one over the first, simply for the craftsmanship and the connection he had to his subjects. He caught so many different aspects of the city and its people that there were few, if any, that didn't keep me enthralled. It was interesting that most of them were inkjet prints but that didn't diminish from the quality of his work.

Interestingly, I didn't really look at any of the other exhibitions in the gallery, due to limited time and the fact that I was not feeling so well. If you have a love of photography, you should check out both of these. The Acting the Part show runs until May 21, 2007 and Herzog show runs until May 13.

By the way, did anyone else out there know that Yoko Ono is releasing a new CD? It's going to be called Yes, I'm a Witch and it will be released on Astralwerks.