The Photographer Who Immortalized Kowloon Walled City's Final Years

Photographer Greg Girard, best known for City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City — THE PHOTOGRAPHER WHO IMMORTALIZED KOWLOON WALLED CITY’S FINAL YEARS

A Canadian-native, Greg Girard spent more than three decades across Asia documenting its cities’ rapid growth. Luck brought him to his biggest project.

VANCOUVER – Greg Girard likes feeling far away from home. In 1976, on his first night in Tokyo, he ventured to a public bathhouse because there were no showers in his building. When he returned to his four and a half tatami sized apartment in West Ikebukuro, he sat in the dark listening to music on the radio, contented by new surroundings until, at the stroke of midnight, the Star-Spangled Banner began to play. “You’re listening to the American Forces Far East Network,” announced the host before discussing happenings on a nearby military base. “It broke the spell, so to speak,” he said.

An enchantment with the unfamiliar has enabled Mr. Girard’s career as a professional photographer and photojournalist to span more than thirty years in East and Southeast Asia. He has lived as a Canadian expat in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, and worked in every country in the region including North Korea but not Nepal. Of nine published photography books documenting evolving urban landscapes, he is best-known for “City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City,” an intimate account of Hong Kong’s notorious Walled City in its final years before demolition in 1992. His photos have appeared in TIME, Newsweek, National Geographic, Fortune, New York Times Magazine, and other regarded publications.

Mr. Girard first picked up a camera in Burnaby, a neighboring city east of Vancouver. With a stripped-down Canon SLR, he rode the bus downtown to take photos of whatever stepped into frame. It was 10 miles from the house he shared with his parents, “but when you’re 17 years old, that commute feels like a big journey,” he said. In Burnaby, single-family homes with tended lawns lined the streets. “The nearest place to shop was a supermarket with a big parking lot,” he said. “Your typical North American suburb.”

**Building and Car, Franklin Street. 1981**

In 1970s downtown Vancouver, Greg observed a common plague: drunkards spilling from raucous bars, prostitutes and drug addicts congregating, and the poor and mentally ill left unclaimed. “I saw how people’s lives were compromised by heroin and alcohol,” he said. Their down-at-the-heels nature became a feature of the area, “and not in a suburban, recreational pursuit, but an insidious problem.” In dark pool halls, local cafés, bars, and restaurants; and outside tired apartment buildings, gasoline stations, and store fronts, he asked strangers if he could take their photo. He was interested in making pictures of people but reached for everything and cherry-picked what he liked best.

He preferred shooting at night, though without a formal education in photography – aside from one graphics course in high school where he learned to process film – he didn’t think of it as ‘night photography.’ “Daylight is gone, but there’s everything else,” he reasoned. A part-time job driving forklifts and loading raw materials at the lumber yard his father managed allowed him to pay the $3.50 nightly rate at cheap motels on weekends so he could maximize sundown.

Half hour bus rides evolved into an eighteen day voyage by sea from San Francisco to Hong Kong after Greg graduated from high school. His friends were booking flights to Europe, but the West didn’t interest him, plus the mid-70s neared the end of the ship-traveling era and he wanted to travel by freighter; it was his vessel’s last trip.

“It’s hard to explain where interest stems from. You can chart its evolution, but that initial thing – I don’t really know,” he admits. It could have been an image of Hong Kong harbor in a Canon brochure that, despite being laughably dark according to Greg, taunted his interest, or the 1948 song, “On a Slow Boat to China” by Frank Loesser that floated in the back of his mind. Having poked around Vancouver’s Chinatown, the underbelly of a population in plain sight, but not yet pronounced, he saw it as a self-contained alluring unknown, a separate world, but close at hand. “All of these things formed a bulb of longing,” he said. Approaching Victoria Harbor from the ship’s deck, he marveled at neon billboards and the weight of the skyline.

Greg’s photos look like stills from a motion picture. As a young man, he paid attention to the cinema of the early 70s like Midnight Cowboy (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), and Cabaret (1972). “It’s not their visuals I picked up on, but their distinct points of view: one of neutral, suspended judgement or an outright fascination with a hidden world,” he said. Fascination and neutrality are an unlikely pairing, but one he exercised his entire career.

After his first trip to Asia, Greg toggled between stretches at home to save money and Japan, the country that breached his itinerary for good. In 1976, after flying to Tokyo for a layover with plans to continue onto Hong Kong and Bangkok, he checked his bags at the airport and left to wander Shinjuku’s illuminated streets unencumbered in the dead of night. He never boarded his connecting flight.

He found work as an English instructor, teaching 4 days a week and making pictures the remaining days. Tokyo was advanced for its time, but its hyper-modernity hadn’t emerged onto the Western socio-cultural landscape. “Unless you were living there, you didn’t know,” he said. “Information traveled differently back then.” His adored the city and had nightmares about waking up back in Canada.

**Two Highschool Students, Tokyo, 1979**

By the mid-80s, Greg settled, as much as someone like him can, in Hong Kong after a chance encounter led to him taking a job as a sound recordist for BBC, U.K.’s public service broadcaster. “I had no experience with sound, but the main requirements were to be competent, interested, and have a passport that allowed visa-less travel,” he said; Hong Kong passport holders inherited restrictions, so hiring a Western citizen was convenient. “I fit all of the requirements.”

He covered subjects for domestic U.K. audiences – natural disasters and royal visits – immersed in the demanding world of news and television. He stood among cameramen and correspondents and studied the photos that wound up published in the magazine. “I could do that,” he thought, maybe even better. He slung his camera over his shoulder while sound recording and took photos of his own. Off the job, he drifted through Hong Kong’s bundled roads until one evening, while exploring an old airport in Kowloon, he caught sight of the Walled City.

At the time the most densely occupied place on Earth housing more than 30,000 residents inside 350 interconnected buildings within one hundredth of a square mile, the Walled City evolved from a Chinese military fort to an architectural feat and societal enigma. In 1842, when China ceded Hong Kong after the first Opium War, the Kowloon site became the only piece of land exempt from British ruling. A century later, China regained ownership, but due to physical separation from the mainland and Britain’s former hands-off approach, its population swelled with minimal, if any, supervision. Low rent and no taxes attracted refugees and squatters. Thousands of crudely built camps amassed, and buildings followed to form a city known for lawless conduct and extreme living conditions.

**Kowloon Walled City Night View from SW Corner, 1987**

“Its reputation was a dreadful slum that every Hong Kong parent told their children to avoid,” said Mr. Girard. “And everyone did. There were almost no pictures of it, especially pre-Internet.” He entered through a low-rise squatter community in 1986, noticing “the homes were actually quite substantial and homey-looking – made of metal sheeting and wood – but technically illegal.” As a photographer, he had roamed fertile terrain before, but nothing like this: alleys so narrow he often had to squeeze by sideways, sweating walls from billowing factory steam, exposed wires snaking from ground-level to multi-stories above, and living quarters that doubled as standard businesses, opium dens, gambling parlors, or brothels.

For the next year, he stepped in and out of the Walled City, taking pictures of its unique mundane on days he was not sound recording. “My god, this is incredible,” Greg remembers thinking. “Some sights were grisly and hard to stomach, but others were strangely beautiful and exhilarating.”

In the beginning, some residents were hostile, shouting or slamming doors, shooing away an obvious outsider and his heavy camera equipment – “there was no way to hide what I was up to,” he said. But following the government’s announcement that the site would be torn down, he sensed compliance and a hint of appreciation. “It became easier once people understood you were there to make some sort of record,” he said. “Nobody would spend that much time there if they weren’t sympathetic.”

“Its reputation was a dreadful slum that every Hong Kong parent told their children to avoid.”

Still trying to break into professional photography, he contacted Asiaweek magazine during the BBC bureau’s annual summer vacation in 1987. He positioned himself to cover the ongoing civil war in Sri Lanka if the magazine could give him a media visa or press accreditation. They agreed, and ran a multi-page feature of Greg’s photos taken from battle zones in Jaffna – a Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) militant crouches in flip-flops with grenades in hand, a maimed child rests in the arms of his caretaker – and offered him a job as a staff photographer.

He fulfilled assignments in countries from the Philippines to Afghanistan. He escorted rolls of unprocessed film to air cargo terminals before placing them in the belly of a plane headed to Asiaweek offices in Hong Kong. “I wouldn’t see my pictures until they were in print,” he said.

Editorial work influenced his approach within the Walled City, images veering towards an aesthetic Greg would later blame on “an over-reliance on wide angle lenses.” But he learned necessary skills too, like how to use basic lighting equipment, which came in handy photographing stacked interiors impenetrable by natural light. The Cantonese called the city “Hak Nam,” meaning “the City of Darkness.”

**West Side Street (with Overhead Pipes), 1990**

**Hairdresser, Kowloon Walled City, 1989**

**Children playing on Walled City rooftop, 1989**

Nathan Road, Yaumatei 1974 — **Nathan Road, 1974**

In 1988, Greg teamed up with architectural photographer, Ian Lambot, after the two met at a party and learned they were both navigating the same chaotic network – Ian mesmerized by the city’s structural complexity and him in how its people lived and worked. They hired a Hong Kong University history graduate student, Emmy Lung, to conduct interviews and develop an oral history for a book.

Greg felt the city was misunderstood and wanted to convey that to the public. It was not a place for the faint-hearted, but as an ecosystem, it actually worked. The press sensationalized a rotten slum, but inside there was a kindergarten, religious temple, and even a senior center; it thrived both as a standalone entity and within a larger Kowloon. “Remember, the Walled City didn’t function in isolation from Hong Kong,” he said. “On at least two of its sides, it looked much like the adjacent neighborhoods: shops at street level with towering apartments above.” Locals took advantage of bargain prices and quicker service for health and dental care. Greg ate meals and had his hair cut once within its walls. “I got to know people, but it’s too much to say I made friends,” he said.

In 1993, he and Ian published “City of Darkness: Kowloon Walled City,” a five-year documentary of the settlement through photographs, essays, maps, and drawings.

Over the next 20 years, amidst building a portfolio of renown publications, came eight more books. He peered into Shanghai and Hanoi in their first years of the 21st century and the American small-town replicas on military bases in Japan, Korea, and Guam. His relationship between book projects and magazine work co-existed as “parallel universes that occasionally merged,” he said.

Media shows and tells, but Mr. Girard would like to permanently observe. For him, photography is not about pushing a narrative or directing the viewer. “I try to avoid relentless topicality,” he said. “Phantom Shanghai,” published in 2007, captures Shanghai in metamorphosis after the Cultural Revolution. Instead of focusing on the plain juxtaposition of rubble and shiny modernity, Greg looked at the evidence that would not survive: the weakened integrity of single-family homes forced to accommodate several generations. (Like the Walled City, rundown but effective.)

In “Hotel Okinawa,” published in 2017, he left out photos of protests happening on the small island refuting America’s ongoing military presence. He says he shot the protests while reporting for magazines, but for his own project wanted to move beyond conventional coverage.

Greg returned to Vancouver in 2011. The Chinese parts of town that were foreign as a young man felt well-acquainted as an ex-expatriate. Combining East and West prompted negotiations mediated only by time.

As more countries nurture big, bright cities with educated populations that travel the world, he acknowledges he has no inherent right to be a witness, but that his Western passport allows him to stand by without too much trouble.

“If it’s already been done, I’m probably not looking at it,” he said. “If I can make it my own, then it’s interesting to me.” He remembers stumbling on Shibuya Crossing years before it became known as Tokyo’s most photogenic kernel. Nowadays, he says it would be too challenging to do it in a way that hasn’t been done.

“I think I’ll only ever be inspired by what’s off the beaten path,” he said. “And over time, things become the beaten path.”

Fendi WangNovember 21, 2020