Accidental Encounters: Greg Girard’s Hong Kong

When an 18-year-old Greg Girard first stepped off a freighter from San Francisco into Hong Kong, he entered a city that would profoundly influence the course of his career. Over the decades that followed, the Canadian photographer’s images have captured the city’s energy, overlooked corners, and fleeting moments of transformation. In this article, Girard reflects on how Hong Kong inspired his career, the intimacy of street level observation, and the full circle satisfaction of seeing his archival photographs returning to the place of their creation.

Hong Kong as Inspiration

Greg Girard’s love for Hong Kong began after dark. Initially attracted by the city’s fluorescent neon signs during his early visits, he soon turned his lens toward the quieter, less noticed corners of the city once he settled in. His personal, nocturnal explorations during Hong Kong’s golden era laid the foundation for his distinctive works. His signature long exposure shots captured the mesmerising effects of artificial lights on colour film, revealing the mystery and solitude hidden within the frenetic front of Hong Kong.

‘During my early visits, I was probably quite seduced by the proliferation of neon, but later, in the early 1980s when I moved to Hong Kong, I started paying attention to the less glamorous side of nights in the city. The rooftops of buildings, the back alleys, the interiors of places that had a slightly forgotten atmosphere. It probably sounds a bit absurd, but I felt like I had “night” to myself back then.’

For over two decades, starting from the late 1980s, Girard worked as magazine photographer. The experience not only supported his everyday living, but it also broadened his network and the genres of photography that he practiced through various assignments, where he would occasionally find himself on the sets of Hong Kong’s cinematic golden age.

‘The only other areas of visual culture that seemed to register the Hong Kong that I loved and was trying to photograph at night were the gangster films of the day. Location scouts for gangster films, like A Better Tomorrow (1986) or Long Arm of the Law (1984), seemed to be on the same wavelength as I was in discovering these overlooked or unusual settings.’

‘I had just started my career as a magazine photographer for a Hong Kong-based magazine [Asiaweek], and in between coverage throughout East Asia, while in Hong Kong, I’d photograph local stories and work on my own projects. The Hong Kong film industry was exporting its products all over the world, particularly to Chinese-speaking communities abroad, and the magazines would report on this. Typically, I’d get permission to photograph on location and spend an evening or an afternoon as a scene or two was being shot. I just tried to stay out of the way and made pictures of whatever was going on.’

Embracing Accidental Encounters

Girard’s photographs often centre on the city’s inhabitants—delivery workers, sailors, office ladies, and street workers—those who inject life to Hong Kong’s streets with their natural vitality. His photographs often arise from ‘accidental encounters’, transforming the chaos of everyday life into intimate portraits of Hong Kong’s streetscapes and its people.

‘These are the people that populate the streets of the city. Everyone has their own look, their own attitude, and the flow at street level makes Hong Kong one of the world’s great cities for walking. In a crowded city like Hong Kong, you share the space at street level with everyone else and so everyone’s “private” space is pretty much abandoned. I make pictures without making too much fuss about it, but I’m also ready to stop someone to ask them to pose if that seems like the way to go at the time.’

Kowloon Walled City

Many of Girard’s images capture the golden era of Hong Kong and the scenes that have vanished since. His photographs of Kowloon Walled City became one of his most well-known bodies of work. Initially drawn to Kowloon Walled City by its striking visual appearance, a vast, organic and adaptive megastructure that starkly contrasted its urban surroundings, he persisted in documenting it to counter its adverse reputations. His photographs are taken mainly from the perspective of the inhabitants, capturing the spaces and happenings of the day-to-day lives within. Girard’s images humanised an urban phenomenon that was otherwise named dangerous, chaotic and lawless, revealing a close-knit community, the resilience of the inhabitants, and documenting its final years before demolition in early 1990s.

‘You have to remember that before the internet, the Walled City was mostly just a rumour. Even as you flew in or out of Kai Tak [Airport] and saw it out the window you probably didn’t know what it was, as it more or less blended into the surrounding urban fabric. But if you stumbled across it at street level like I did one evening, it registered as a very different thing entirely. Less a building than an agglomeration of home-made looking high-rise buildings all joined together, and it made you wonder “how is this allowed in modern Hong Kong”?’

‘I started photographing tentatively at first, as you were made to feel unwelcome with a camera in those early days. But, little by little, I made progress. I decided to use lighting equipment and photograph in colour, since the only other photographs I’d seen tended to exaggerate the grittiness and basically perpetuate the rumours about the place as a dark, dirty, dangerous ghetto. It was dark and dirty I suppose, but it wasn’t dangerous. It was a place where people were simply trying to get by, raise and educate their kids, and make a living in this extraordinary, fascinating, very unusual environment.’

The Journey of HK:PM

Commissioned by M+, Girard’s analogue photographs between the 1970s to 1990s returned to Hong Kong as HK:PM (2025), a cinematic sequence displayed on the M+ Facade. Building on the 2024 event ‘Hong Kong Made Me’, a live-cinema performance at M+ intertwining Girard’s images and a score by Beijing rock band Gong Gong Gong, the facade commission transforms still images into an urban visual journey.

‘I have some experience putting photography books [of mine] together, editing and sequencing on a page and between pages. But the experience of watching a film is different, and the experience of “taking in” rather than actively watching a billboard projection is different again. Although you present it as a beginning-to-end sequence, you’re also aware that it’s likely going to be viewed partially and in a disjointed way. And so, each image has to grab you no matter at what point you come into “the movie”. As for imagining how it would all look 18-stories high, I really had no idea. I happened to be in Hong Kong some months before presenting HK:PM so I did have a chance to take in what the display looked like in a general sense.’

The enduring influence of Hong Kong

Comparing Hong Kong to other Asian metropolises he has documented, such as Tokyo in the late 1970s and Shanghai from the late 1990s onwards, Girard captured each city on the verge of major socio-economic changes, but no city has left a deeper imprint on Girard’s trajectory than Hong Kong.

‘I have to say that Hong Kong made me. A fact and a tribute that was made real in my first M+ commission in 2024. Hong Kong gave me my start as a working photographer, and it happened through the people I met who I’ll never forget.’

‘I don’t think you can really separate any place from the time you lived there. But perhaps there is something to the idea of a moment in time when a city is somehow most itself. I lived in Hong Kong from the early 1980s until 1998 just after the Handover. That period is always going to be rather special. At the same time, I think objectively, that period actually was a kind of “golden age” for Hong Kong. Though with golden ages, you rarely know when you’re living through one. It’s only looking back that you see it. It’s completely random and unpredictable except, perhaps for some inkling, some notion that now is the time to go and see what’s going on.’

Even today, Girard’s gaze and photographic approach remain unchanged. Girard shows us how intimate moments and personal memories together shape a collective history, connecting the past with the present. Through his lens, Hong Kong endures not as nostalgia, but as a living force that continues to shape those it once captivated.

‘I don’t know I’d do anything different today, wherever I was. I mostly try to photograph “now”, whatever that looks like or feels like in a place. And usually, I’m always trying to get at some hidden part of “now” that seems overlooked or ignored. Probably I’d photograph people, or at least start there.’

‘It’s quite mind boggling really. I never imagined my photographs of Hong Kong from the 1970s and 1980s would ever have an audience. In the same way I never imagined it would be possible to have a life as a photographer or artist. And so, to have the work travel the decades and end up displayed on the literal urban fabric they came from, is exceptionally gratifying and a tremendous honour.’