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| Walled City Exterior, 1987, from "Kowloon Walled City" |
Greg Girard is a Canadian photographer (b. 1955) who has spent much of his career in Asia, first visiting Hong Kong in 1974, and later living in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. He became a professional photographer in 1987, based first in Hong Kong and later in Shanghai. His work to date has examined the social and physical transformations taking place throughout the region.
In 1993 he co-authored (with Ian Lambot) City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City, a record in photographs and text of the final years of Hong Kong's infamous Walled City, demolished in 1992. This unique city-within-a-city was comprised of 300 separate interconnected high-rise buildings, erected piecemeal, and housed more than 33,000 people. In 2007, Phantom Shanghai - a monograph of his photographs of Shanghai - was published by Magenta Publishing for the Arts.
In the Near Distance, a book of photographs made between 1973 and 1985 during his early travels, was published in 2010 by Kominek Publications, Berlin. Hanoi Calling, published in 2010 by Magenta Publishing for the Arts, is his fourth book and looks at the Vietnamese capital on the eve of its millennium anniversary.
His work is represented by Monte Clark Gallery (Vancouver/Toronto). He works on assignment for publications such as National Geographic Magazine and continues to pursue long-term book length projects.
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| Buildings on Bat Su Street, 2010, from "Hanoi Calling" |
Greg Girard: I don’t know if there is any single thing. There was a photograph of Hong Kong harbor in a Time-Life series of photography books in the early 1970s; it showed neon signs atop buildings, at dusk on a day darkened by rain. In the foreground was a local fisherman standing and rowing a small skiff. The clash of the two worlds (neon, modern buildings/fishing, sampans) was dramatic and yet somehow matter of fact, and I thought I’d like to be in that place, and try to take photographs that had whatever that photograph had in it. After graduating from high school I worked and saved money and then travelled to Hong Kong by Philippine freighter in 1974. I was 18 years old. Friends were heading to Europe, which didn’t interest me. I was reading the novels of writers who had set stories in that part of the world (Graham Green’s The Quiet American). Events in the news at the time also played some part, the Vietnam War in its final years was in the background. A couple of years later I visited Tokyo and decided to stay, living there for nearly three years, and then in 1982 moved to Hong Kong.
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| House on Yuyuan Lu, 2001, from "Phantom Shanghai" |
f: Much of your work examines the themes of the social and physical transformations taking place throughout Asia. Talk with us about what you have learned during your career about the connection between the physical and social transformations of a society. How much does creation and demolition of space change a people? And how much does the nature of a people shape their decisions on how to form their physical surroundings?
GG: Early fascination with that part of the world also came in part from the question of what constitutes "normal" in a place like Hong Kong, where verticality and density are so common that it hardly registers on its residents. Within Hong Kong itself the most extreme example was probably the Kowloon Walled City, one large city block with over three hundred interconnected high-rise buildings, built without the contribution of a single architect, home to 33,000 people. I say it hardly registers but of course it does, in ways that aren’t always apparent.
In Shanghai in the mid- to late-1990s much of the city looked like it had been bombed from the air, so widespread was the demolition of central neighborhoods. It was a unique moment because at the same time the pace of new construction was just staggering. Following a directive from Beijing the city was racing to make up for lost time. Between 1949 and 1990 there had been hardly any new construction in the city, certainly not the kind of urban development for profit that creates skylines.
One of the things I wanted to look at was not simply the contrast between what was disappearing and what was arriving but rather something perhaps not immediately apparent, and that was the way the city's period architecture had been used in ways never intended. Single-family houses and apartments had been reconfigured to accommodate many more people than they were originally built for. This was a feature of life for Shanghai's residents in the New China after 1949, and especially after the Cultural Revolution. Hallways were turned into communal kitchens, car garages into homes, storage spaces into bedrooms. How that worked and what it looked like, knowing it would eventually disappear, was something I wanted to pay attention to.
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| Cubicle Kitchen, 2005, from "Phantom Shanghai" |
f: How would you describe the changes in terms of urban development and preservation policy in Asia between your first trips there in the 1970’s and today?
GG: In Shanghai, for example, preservation was something that happened by default, when China rejected capitalism and banned private property. That was later reversed, unleashing a frenzy of demolition and construction unlike anywhere on the planet. By the time people start thinking about preservation it's usually a belated effort to slow a process that has already gone too far. It's also a sign that a society or a place has matured. Young people in Hong Kong today have an appreciation for their city and its history - as evidenced in the built environment - that the previous generation didn't.
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| Children on Rooftop, 1990, from "Kowloon Walled City" |