Greg Girard (born in 1955) is a Canadian photographer who has been examining the social and physical transformations taking place throughout the Asian region. Born and raised in a suburb of Vancouver, Girard began taking photographs as a high school student in the 1970s, spending days and nights in the downtown districts surrounding the port. In 1974 he first travelled to Hong Kong, where he later settled and found work, first as a sound recordist for the BBC, and then eventually as a photographer.
Hong Kong 1974-1989 is the earliest work of the photographer’s long relationship with Asia. It may be defined as « Making Hongkong Mine » in his own words. “At the time, I wasn’t seeing anything, apart from a rare scene in a Hong Kong gangster film perhaps, that was visually registering the place I was living in,” says Girard. Contrarily his series explores the underside of a city he first visited as a teenager and later lived in for 15 years. “I started taking photographs at night as soon as I picked up my first camera. I never really thought of them as “night” pictures. It was just a different kind of light, whether neon, fluorescent, moonlight or the light of the city reflected off an overcast sky. But Hong Kong was alive at night in a way that other places weren’t.”
