“Shanghai—a city in the process of dismantling its history to accommodate China’s new cosmopolitan vision of itself.”—Greg Girard
As Shanghai modernizes and seeks acceptance as an international city, buildings and neighborhoods that were once preserved simply by lack of intervention are now being purposefully demolished.
 Phantom Shanghai is a spectacular look at a Shanghai that won’t survive the vision the country has for itself. For the past five years, Greg Girard has been photographing the city’s buildings, shops, homes, and neighborhoods. This stunning photographic journey is a look at present-day Shanghai, where politically inspired neglect meets politically inspired development.
 Greg Girard is a Canadian photographer living in Shanghai since 1998. Largely self-taught, he combines anthropology with a lyrical realism in his work. He is represented in North America by Monte Clark Gallery in Toronto. His editorial work appears in publications such as TIME, Newsweek, Fortune, and The New York Times Magazine.
 William Gibson is an American-born Canadian science fiction author. He has been called the father of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. He is credited with coining the term “cyberspace.” His first novel, Neuromancer, has sold more than 6.5 million copies worldwide since its publication in 1984. He is also responsible for Pattern Recognition and the screenplay for Johnny Mnemonic.

Phantom Shanghai

Arts & Photography

GREG GIRARD

Individual Artists

The Magenta Foundation

The Dead

Created over an almost 20-year span and drawing from 18 bodies of work, this is the first published monograph of Aline Smithson’s work and features her defining series Arrangement in Green and Black: Portrait of the Photographer’s Mother. From black-and-white to hand-painted photographs, this collection of portraits combines humor and family to create a universal expression of motherhood, to capture the essence of childhood, and to examine created realities, the poignancy of childhood, and the pathos of aging and relationships. She brings a background in painting and fashion to her images, but at the heart of her work is her ability to recognize the inner self of her subjects. The photographer considers all her portraits as a reflection of herself and the stories she wants to tell and in this way she has created a visual language that is her own unique autobiography.

Self & Others: Portrait as Autobiography

Photography & Video

Previously published online and receiving viral exposure, this series of photographs examines how society uses gaze to project emotion and how we interpret the looks of others. The project began after the photographer noticed the facial expressions of a man standing behind her in the self-portrait she had set up in the middle of Times Square. Intrigued by the man and a similar photo that followed on the roll of film the photographer decided to set up her camera for the purpose of capturing the expressions of passersby. Each frame is chosen based on the strangers in the background, if they have a critical or questioning look, or if there is a gesture in their body language. By reversing the gaze back on the strangers, the collection begins a conversation about nonverbal interaction and the view society has on body image.

The Watchers

Greg Girard’s photographs of Vancouver from the 1970s and early 1980s show us the city’s final days as a port town at the end of the railway line. Soon after Vancouver began to be noticed by the wider world (Expo 86 is generally agreed on as the pivotal moment), the city began refashioning itself as an urban resort on nature’s doorstep and attracting attention as a destination for real estate investment. At that time, long before post-9/11 security concerns sealed off the working waterfront from the city, many of Vancouver’s downtown and east side streets ended at the waterfront, an area filled with commercial fishing docks, cargo terminals, and bars and cafes for waterfront workers and sailors. Pawn-shop windows downtown displayed outboard motors, chainsaws and fishing gear. Wandering these streets, living in cheap hotels, Girard photographed the workaday (and night) world of the city where he grew up. The photographs in Under Vancouver 1972–1982 were made before Girard began earning a living as a magazine photographer, later establishing a formal practice as an artist. They reveal an early interest in the hidden and the overlooked, the use of color film at night, and the extended photographic inquiry of a specific place, all of which became signature features of later books such as City of Darkness and City of Darkness Revisited (about the infamous Kowloon Walled City), Phantom Shanghai and Hanoi Calling. Under Vancouver 1972–1982 is the first comprehensive collection of Girard’s early photographs of Vancouver. Made in and of the moment, a young photographer’s earliest engagements (often featuring the underside of the city), the pictures now form an unintended photographic record of a Vancouver that has all but disappeared.

Under Vancouver 1972-1982

The photographs in this collection are about the Tokyo that Greg Girard was living in from 1976-1983. It would be some years later before he started making a living as a magazine photographer and many years after that before he started to consider his early, mostly unpublished, work from Japan as significant. These photographs are the result of the decision made by a then 20-year-old Girard and the momentum from that first impression which turned him loose in a city that he never tired of photographing, both during the years he lived there and on subsequent visits.

Tokyo-Yokosuka 1976-1983

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