Hanoi Calling: One Thousand Years Now
Greg Girard

In October 2010 Vietnam’s vibrant capitol Hanoi will celebrate its millennium anniversary. To commemorate this momentous occasion, Greg Girard was invited to capture the spirit of daily life and the architectural heritage of this unique and complex city.

Eschewing the city’s better-known landmarks, Girard instead explores the usually overlooked features that define daily life for residents, taking us into a private and intimate version of the everyday.

Greg Girard is a Canadian photographer whose work has examined the social and physical transformations in Asia’s largest cities for more than three decades. City of Darkness Revisited,released in 2014, revives an early collaboration with co-author Ian Lambot, and updates their seminal book, City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City (Watermark, 1993).

Based in Shanghai between 1998 and 2011, his photographic monograph, Phantom Shanghai(Magenta, Toronto, 2007), with a foreword by novelist William Gibson, looks at the rapid and at times violent transition of Shanghai as the city raced to make itself “modern again” at the beginning of the 21st Century.

Other titles include Hanoi Calling (Magenta, Toronto, 2010) and In the Near Distance (Kominek, Berlin, 2010), a book of early photographs made in Asia and North America between 1973 and 1986.

Girard’s work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, The Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery and other public and private collections. He is represented in Canada by Monte Clark Gallery. In addition to book projects and gallery work, Girard is a contributing photographer to National Geographic magazine. “How the DNA Revolution is Changing Us” appeared in the August 2016 issue. Other stories include “Can China Go Green?”, “The Kingdom of David and Solomon”, and “Bitter Waters: China’s Water Crisis.”