Greg Girard Photographs 1972-2026

The Polygon Gallery 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, neighbourhoods, and shifting social fabric in the 1970s and 1980s. His images from this period, collected in Under Vancouver, 1972–1982 (2017), reveal a city in flux and a photographer attuned to both human presence and architectural change, offering an intimate yet expansive portrait of Vancouver’s history and culture.

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 in City of Darkness (1993, first edition; 1999, reprint) and in City of Darkness Revisited (2014, first edition; 2021, reprint) co-authored with Ian Lambot, have formed the basis for countless reimaginings 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.

His work has appeared in National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Time, Fortune, The Sunday Times Magazine (UK), and other publications. The retrospective offers a sweeping view of Girard’s career, from Vancouver to Asia’s largest most dynamic cities, tracing his evolution as a photographer and his unparallelled ability to capture cities in transition.

Visit The Polygon for exhibition details
https://thepolygon.ca/exhibition/greg-girard/