reg Girard (Vancouver, 1955) is a Canadian photographer living in Shanghai since 1998. His work looks at the physical and social transformations taking place in China and Asia. He divides his time between photographing on assignment for publications such as National Geographic, Time, Fortune, The New York Times Magazine, and others, and pursuing his personal work. In North America he is represented by Monte Clark Gallery (Toronto, Vancouver). While living in Hong Kong between 1983 and 1998 he published “City of Darkness”, co-authored by Ian Lambot, a document of the final years of the Kowloon Walled City. In 2002, in collaboration with fellow photographer Fritz Hoffmann, Girard launched the picture agency documentCHINA, an online archive specializing in contemporary photography from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
His second book, “Phantom Shanghai” (Magenta, 2007), with an introduction by novelist William Gibson, looks at the homes, streets, shops, buildings and neighborhoods that will not survive China’s cities modernisation. As Shanghai changes, buildings and neighbourhoods that were once preserved ‘by accident’ are now being purposefully demolished. Since 1998, Greg Girard has been photographing the effect this transformation has had on China’s largest city. Phantom Shanghai is the result: a spectacular photographic journey through the Shanghai that is unlikely to survive its vision of urban development. Says the author: “These are photographs of the Shanghai that will not survive the vision the city as for itself. That these homes, shops, lanes and buildings survived as long as they did, and in the way that they did, is by accident rather than design. Whatever the utility of this partial and very subjective record, my intentions, as much as I understand them, have little to do with architecture or preservation. I’m not an historian or an architectural photographer. But I do want to make photographs that show what a place, this place, looks like when it’s used in this way. Here is Shanghai’s ‘lived-in-ness’, the vanishing evidence of the hard flow of time through this city”. In 2010 Girard has published his new project, “Hanoi Calling: One Thousand Years Now” (Magenta), that explores the overlooked features that define life for residents of Hanoi, in occasion of the 1,000th anniversary of the founding of the capital city of Vietnam.
William Gibson Phantom Shangai foreword:
“I have never had quite this difficult a time trying to think of something to say at the front of a book. I ‘ve had a box of Greg Girard’s photographs here for entirely too long now, and every time I open it and start looking through them, it’s as though my head falls off . I’ve never seen anything like them. I have, though, imagined things not unlike what they depict, though never at anything like this resolution. In my novel Nueromancer, when the protagonists visit a decrepit surviving fragment of the lower Manhattan hemmed in by my sketchy description of Bigger, Globally Corporate Things, I had something like these photographs in mind. But every time I open the box and look a t them, they shut me up. Lump in throat. Liminal . Images a t the threshold of the threshold. The dividing line. Something slicing across accretions of cultural memory like Bunuel ‘s razor. Documents of the Gone World, captured, one thinks, the Tuesday before it went entirely. Something so aching. The record of something which we know, instinctively, shouldn’t happen. They really shouldn’t do this, but . . . .
Erasure. And look what they’ve erased. Wiped clean. Catch this last (and in my case, first) glimpse. Adios. “one little whoops and a push.” Gone, then. And beyond the shattered matchstick fields of progress arise these shoals of cheap-ass concrete thunderheads, these arc-l it mesas apparently designed to emulate down-market Japanese consumer electronics. At the t ime of writing , I freely confess, I know l ittle more about Shanghai than these images. They came upon me, as it were, in the night , unexpectedly. I know, and knew instantly, that I will never forget them. I had long treasured Ian Lambot and Greg Girard’s City of Darkness, but in its case, I had a lready seen other and, as it happened, quite splendid photographs of Hak Nam and knew that that place, that near-infinitely interstitial universe or black hole, was indeed Gone. Phantom Shanghai is the actual vanishing, the hideous 21st century urban hat trick itself. I think of the line of dawn rushing through desert, casuing stones to explode. It is a lmost more than I can bear to contemplate, though the images themselves are so gorgeous, so extraordinary, that, of course, I look and look. These images truly are, in that particular coinage of J.G. Ballard’s, terminal documents. One might compare them to Robert Polidori ‘s images of Pripyat and Chernobyl , except that what Girard reveals is so much more possibly the fate of so many places, hence so much more terrible. I go back to the box, look again, and again am struck silent”.
