Exhibit goes behind Fred Herzog photos to untold stories of Vancouver’s Chinatown | Globalnews.ca (2025)

A new exhibit is harnessing the work of an iconic Vancouver street photographer to help unearth some of the untold stories of the city’s Chinatown.

Vitality: Iconic Images, Hidden Stories at the Chinatown Storytelling Centre pairs 16 of Fred Herzog’s lush Kodachrome images captured in the historic Chinatown, Strathcona and Hastings neighbourhoods.

Those images are paired with an exhibit diving into the real lives of the people who lived in and shaped the neighbourhoods, crafted in close collaboration with the community.

They’re stories like those of Maurice Wong. Now 84, the retired dentist grew up in Chinatown, watching the neighbourhood bustle from his family’s tailor shop.

“Chinatown started with restaurants, saloons, brothels and so forth. Nobody else wanted this real estate,” he said.

“Just imagine from that window a five-year-old and six-year-old peering out over the hub of Chinatown where the action was.”

The vitality of the neighbourhood is what Carol Lee, chair of Vancouver Chinatown Foundation, says shines from Herzog’s photographs.

“(Herzog) said that he wanted to photograph Chinatown, not to make a statement about Chinatown but it was a neighbourhood that was just so alive and there was vitality on the street here,” she said.

It’s an energy said she feels a personal connection to, recalling her own memories in the community.

“It was one big happy community where you knew almost everybody on the street, some anutie, some uncle, and it was very alive, there was lots of sounds, it was very noisy, children playing, the sound of Cantonese, people yelling,” she said.

Those memories helped form the foundation of what Lee thought a community should be like.

It’s a sense that comes full circle in the exhibit, she said, by asking the viewer to imagine a future for the community that shares that same vitality.

“I think what we want to show is the radiating theme of these photographs is one of hope,” Lee said.

“And I think what we were hoping for for this particular show was that people could see what the neighbourhood used to be and what it could become again.”

The exhibit runs in parallel with a larger showing of 50 of Herzog’s works at the Equinox Gallery for the 2025 Capture Photography Festivel.

You can check out Vitality until Dec. 31.