The first retrospective of Greg Girard’s 50 years of photography, tracing his work from Vancouver to Hong Kong and Shanghai. Polygon presents the first-ever career survey of Greg Girard, one of Canada’s most important contemporary photographers. The exhibition highlights Girard’s deep engagement with the urban landscape, beginning with his early work in Vancouver, where he documented the city’s streets, neighborhoods, and shifting social fabric in the 1970s and 1980s. An early interest in Asia resulted in his living for decades in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai where he captured these cities extraordinary and often tumultuous transformations at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st. His record of life in Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City (City of Darkness and City of Darkness Revisited), co-authored with Ian Lambot, have formed the basis for countless reimagining’s of a dystopian/romantic, Asia-influenced, urbanized near future in film and video games. These images, along with the work in Phantom Shanghai (2007), illustrate the tension between memory and progress, the built environment and human experience, and have earned international acclaim.
