Due to the visual nature of this episode, we would recommend that you watch the accompanying video on our YouTube channel.

Greg's work

Before the Kowloon Walled City was demolished in 1993, Greg Girard was doing something very few, nigh on zero, local Hong Kongers were doing. Greg, camera in hand, was documenting a place which to many immediate residents and neighbours was utterly ordinary. It was a jangly juxtaposition of overbuilt and underbuilt, a seedy, sensationalised tourist myth, also simply "home" for hundreds of everyday hardworking families. For all those reasons it was a fixture, and furthermore like most fixtures was taken for granted-- even after the announcement of its pending demolishment. Somehow, Greg, an award-winning Canadian photographer whose work spans five decades across Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, and beyond, decided this place was in fact remarkable. He was both plucky and persistent enough to essential bet his imaging career on it.

His books include City of Darkness, which compiles a defining visual record of the Kowloon Walled City, and Hong Kong PM 1974–1989. His work has appeared in Time, National Geographic, and major galleries including the ICP in New York, and is held in the collection of Hong Kong's M+ Museum.

In this episode, we walk through some of the most striking images from Hong Kong PM with Greg, discussing what it felt like to arrive in 1974 as an 18-year-old on a cargo ship, and why many of the most extraordinary photographs come from the tension of ordinary x extraordinary.

We also dig deep on the headlining Walled City project, and why Greg felt a sense of responsibility to document it. Greg explains how he won people's trust after years of sensationalist press, and why every single former resident he's spoken to is grateful the record exists, even as some outsiders still misread the work today.

We hope you enjoy.