If you go by 158 West 5th in Vancouver, you will find a non-descript industrial building. But when Fred Herzog passed by in 1960, it was a small grocery store covered in advertising signs.
The side featured a giant “Drink Coca-Cola” sign above a couple of “Fresh Up with 7UP” advertisements. The front had eight more 7UP signs, six for Coca-Cola, three for Red Rose Tea, two Pepsi signs, and a Craven ‘A’ ad.
A quartet of scruffy young kids were hanging out outside the store, not paying any attention to Herzog whatsoever. The store was also looking a bit weather-beaten — the shingles looked like they hadn’t been painted in decades.
Herzog loved it, so he took a photo. And 54 years later, it has been made into a stamp.
Bogner’s Grocery is one of seven images featured in Canada Post’s second Canadian photography stamp series, alongside works by acclaimed photographers such as Edward Burtynsky, Lynne Cohen, Michel Lambeth, William Notman and Louis-Prudent Vallee.
The other B.C. photographer in the series is C.D. Hoy, a Chinese immigrant who came to Quesnel in 1903 and took some exceptional portraits in Quesnel and Barkerville between 1911 and 1924.
The Hoy stamp is of an unidentified Chinese man in 1912, resplendent in a spiffy suit and vest and smoking a cigar. It was probably taken while Hoy was working as a farmhand — he later operated a general store, and took photos as a sideline.
Herzog, 83, immigrated to Canada from Germany in the 1950s and was fascinated by North American culture. So he set out to document it.
“The signs are a very, very important pictorial part of the American city,” he said of Bogner’s Grocery in a 2005 interview.
“I won’t even say pictorial, an important cultural part of the American city. If you take the Coca-Cola and other signs away from America downtown, you have nothing. Maybe some interesting architecture, but not very much.
“The neon signs and the soft drink signs, the cigarette ads and the billboards, and the posters and the graffiti and collages of torn-off posters, all that contributes to make the city a place where art actually happens. That kind of casual art, overlapping posters, can be very, very interesting. Those posters illustrate the city even if people are not there.
“A store like this was a gem. You cannot fake that. Look how casually they nailed this big sign over the small one. The Coca-Cola man says ‘We’ve got another big sign,’ and the person who owns the store says ‘Well, put it up.’”
The Canadian photography series is a five-year program. Jim Phillips at Canada Post said photography experts from across the country were asked to select their top-35 photographers of the last 150 years, and their favourite works by each photographer.
Canada Post then collected the results and put together 35 stamps, one per photographer. Last year’s crop included Vancouver’s Rodney Graham and Jim Breukelman, along with Thomas Coffin Doane, Margaret Watkins, Geraldine Moodie, Arnaud Maggs and Gabor Szilasi.
Phillips said that about three million stamps will be printed of the seven images, which breaks down to about 425,000 each. They will be issued in three denominations.
Herzog and Hoy will be domestic 85-cent stamps, while William Notman’s 1885 photo of Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull will be issued at the $1.20 US rate. The Burtynsky stamp, Railcuts #1, will be issued at the $2.50 international rate.
