Girard and Lambot spent four years exploring the notorious Walled City of Kowloon (Hong Kong), before it's final clearance in 1992. With over 320 photographs, 32 extended interviews, and essays on the City's history and character, this reprint is not only an informative glimpse of a now vanished landmark but a sensitive and penetrating portrait of a unique community.
Greg Girard is a Canadian photographer who has spent more than 30 years photographing in Asia, living first in Tokyo in the late 1970s, Hong Kong in the 1980s and 90s, and based in Shanghai from 1998 until 2012. His work examines the social and physical transformations taking place in the region. "City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City", published in 1993, in collaboration with Ian Lambot, documents the final years of one of Hong Kong's most infamous yet little understood neighborhoods. "Phantom Shanghai", with an introduction by William Gibson, published in 2007, looks at the extraordinary changes that have taken place in China's largest city, as the early 20th Century Chinese/International city is replaced by a centrally-planned 21st Century version of itself. "Hanoi Calling" and "In the Near Distance" were both published in 2010. "In the Near Distance" brings together early photographs taken between 1973 and 1985, in Asia and the West; "Hanoi Calling" looks at often ignored elements of the everyday in the Vietnamese capital on the eve of its millennium anniversary in 2010.
Greg Girard presently lives in Vancouver, Canada.
