Greg Girard (b. 1955) is a Canadian photographer who has spent much of his career in Asia. For more than four decades, his work has examined the social and physical changes in Asian cities, especially the largest ones. He settled in Hong Kong in the early 1980s and worked from there for the next fifteen or sixteen years, and he was based in Shanghai from 1998 to 2011. For many years he worked as a magazine photographer, and his photographs have appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Time, Fortune, and The Sunday Times Magazine.
City of Darkness Revisited (2014) revives an early collaboration with Ian Lambot and updates their book City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City (Watermark, 1993). Phantom Shanghai (Magenta, 2007), with a foreword by William Gibson, looks at the rapid changes in Shanghai at the beginning of the 21st century. His other books include Hanoi Calling (Magenta, 2010), In the Near Distance (Kominek, 2010), Under Vancouver 1972–1982 (Magenta, 2017), HK:PM. Hong Kong Night Life 1974–1989 (AsiaOne, 2017), and Hotel Okinawa (The Velvet Cell, 2017).
Greg Girard: Photographs 1972–2026 (The Magenta Foundation, 2026), published in partnership with The Polygon Gallery, brings together more than 200 photographs from five decades, from his early work in Vancouver to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and other parts of Asia. Putting the book and exhibition together brought out a strong body of photographs of people, many of them from the early part of his career.
His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and M+ in Hong Kong. He is represented by Monte Clark Gallery in Vancouver.
