The Monte Clark Gallery Vancouver is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of previously unseen works by Shanghai based photographer Greg Girard.
SAILORS:
Greg Girard
May 26th to June 30th , 2007
Opening Saturday 26th May, 2 – 5pm
Artist in attendance
The exhibition SAILORS is comprised of eleven photographs of young American servicemen based on both sides of the Pacific during the final years of the Cold War, between the fall of Saigon (1975) and the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989.) American ground troops had recently been withdrawn from South Vietnam and the Saigon Government would fall shortly afterwards, but the US continued to maintain a network of military bases in the region, which Girard visited whist traveling South East Asia.
“I wanted to be a photographer probably in the same way that young men used to want to join the Navy: to leave home and see the world. I was 18 years old, the sailors not much older than myself.”
Inspired by the photo “Sailors Key West” by Marie Cosindas, which he saw in the early 70’s, and in awe of the transient life and bravery of such young men, Girard began to capture the chaos and lives around him. This passion for depicting life as it is became the basis of his future career as a photojournalist and later as a full time photographer working on his own artistic projects.
Girard was born in Vancouver, and has been living in Asia since 1983 where he has worked extensively as a photojournalist for magazines such as Time and Newsweek. Since 1983 he has also pursued personal photographic projects such as his study of the Kowloon Walled City which culminated in the book City of Darkness (1993).
In 2002 Girard co-founded the picture agency documentChina, an online archive of contemporary photography from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. : www.documentchina.com
2007 also sees the publication and international release of a Greg Girard monograph published by Magenta Foundation, “Phantom Shanghai” which includes 135 images representing the changing tide of architecture and development in Shanghai.
Recent exhibitions include:
Kwangju Biennale, Kwangju, South Korea, 1997;
Cities of the Twenty-first Century, The Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany, 2000,
Cities on the Move presented at the Hayward Gallery, London, 1999, Kiasma, Helsinki, 2001 and
Phantom Shanghai Monte Clark Gallery Toronto. 2005
DOWNTOWN Monte Clark Gallery Vancouver.
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