Photographing Disappearing Cities With Greg Girard

Greg Girard is a Canadian photographer who has spent much of his career capturing the urban landscapes and people of Asia. He has authored several photographic books, including City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City, Phantom Shanghai, and most recently his upcoming book Snack Sakura, which explores Japan’s iconic night-time snack bars.

Greg Girard on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/gregforaday

Greg Girard website - https://www.greggirard.com/

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Nowadays everybody's recording everything, everywhere, all the
time. And whatever happens, there's
usually video of it, not just photographs, but video, you
know, So there's no kind of guarantee of anonymity anymore,
you know, in, in the city. And that's what the city used to

(00:21):
represent was the ability to be anonymous, you know, and not no
one to know who you are. Hello, I am Cody Allingham and
this is the Transformation of Value, a place for asking
questions about freedom, money and creativity.
Today I'm joined by Greg Gerard,a Canadian photographer who has
spent much of his career shooting the urban landscape and

(00:45):
people of Asia. He has authored several
photographic books including City of Darkness, Life in
Kowloon, Walled City, Phantom Shanghai, and most recently, his
upcoming book Snack Sakuda, exploring the iconic nighttime
snack bars of Japan. Greg, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I'm glad to hear have you out

(01:06):
here in the studio in Kamakuda. Indeed, I just picked you up
from Kamakuda train station justbefore, which is on the Tokyo
Yukoska line. And of course, your 2019 photo
book was titled Tokyo Yukoska 19761983.
Here we are 40 years later, the same place but a different time.

(01:27):
Tell me about the first time youcame out this way.
Well, the first time was 1976 and I had a ticket stopping
everywhere from the West Coast of the states to various places
in Asia. So San Francisco, Los Angeles,
Honolulu, Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, Bangkok, go one way

(01:50):
ticket on Korean airlines. And I didn't plan to stay in
Japan. I wanted to see it, though,
because I'd heard about it from another young traveller on a
previous trip who talked about Tokyo and he talked about in a
way I'd never heard before. You know, this was before Tokyo

(02:12):
was known as our near future urban Asian influenced future
that Blade Runner gave us and was later referenced in many
ways in many places, but that was not really known in 1976.
So I stopped in Tokyo intending to stay a couple days, rode the

(02:39):
Yamanote line around Tokyo the first night and got off in
Shinjuku and walked around all night.
Liked it and decided to stay so.Wow, that Korean Airlines
flight. How did that come about?
Well, back then, I guess that's that was a typical kind of
ticket. You could buy something that

(02:59):
stopped everywhere, you know, and airlines used to do these
kind of milk runs through whatever region, stopping
everywhere. So rather than going nonstop,
you could simply get off everywhere they stopped and
serviced. And it was, you know, I think
something a lot of people did who were maybe taking some time

(03:21):
off or were having that break here or, or or whatever.
So it was, yeah, a a cheap and efficient way to to see in, in
this case, Asia. This is 1976, had you travelled
much before then? The previous year I'd been in
Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, but not Japan.

(03:42):
And I probably avoided Japan because in those days, and this
is really, you can say pre bubble Tokyo, so it was before
Japan was well known in those days as an expensive place.
And that's no longer true, of course.
But in those days, if you were akind of a backpack level

(04:04):
traveler, you might avoid some place that's expensive.
And that was Japan's reputation in those days.
So, but I wanted to see it, having talked to this young
Australian guy who painted this picture of Tokyo that I'd never
seen or heard of. The train conductors and their
stylized gestures as the trains or subway trains depart, the

(04:29):
mannered voices of elevator operators in department stores,
You know, those kind of things that unless you've been in
Japan, you wouldn't notice or hear about.
And that certainly hadn't percolated into popular culture,
you know, So it was just on the hearing this story about what
Tokyo was like that made me wantto see it.

(04:50):
And of course, it turned out to be exactly true.
All of those things were the little, not even nuanced, but
the daily sort of features of life as you move around Tokyo,
the kinds of things you run into.
It's 22 images come to mind. The first one is of course the

(05:12):
vendors who we were just talkingabout before.
Who after Uzi Yasujito died, he sort of came here and went on
his own pilgrimage to sort of film and explore the work that
Ozo had left behind with his film Tokyo Ghah.
And he's you could see on the film his fascination with things
like the Pachinko palas and the the Minuchet of Japan in that

(05:35):
period. I believe that was in the 80s.
And then the other one that comes to mind is Andrei
Tarkovsky, the great Soviet filmmaker with Solaris, this
sci-fi future, this kind of deepphilosophical space film that
features these images of the Tokyo highways as in lieu of a

(05:59):
futuristic world. And I believe they somehow
managed to get here from the Soviet Union to film there.
And these two images of kind of an unknown universe of what lies
in Japan. I can sort of especially pre
Internet, you know, the the allure of that must have been
quite, quite profound and. And of course, Chris Marker as

(06:20):
well, who I, I wasn't aware of at the time, you know, I mean,
there really wasn't anything to prepare you for modern Japan in
those days, unless you maybe look at the kind of almost camp
version of it in something like the James Bond film that was

(06:42):
made here. I think it was he only lived
twice and that was I think 1967.So, you know, it's this Japan
viewed through the lens of the, the kind of the campy fantasy of
James Bond in the in the in the late 60s.
And so they're just, they're just weren't versions of modern

(07:04):
Japan floating around. I mean, if, you know, if you
wanted to see Japan, you'd, you'd have to see Japanese
movies. And commercial Japanese movies
aren't the ones making it into art houses in the West.
You know, it's going to be Ozu Kurosawa, people like that.
And a lot of that work was already quite dated, you know,
fifties, 60s maybe, you know, Soyou're not, you're not.

(07:27):
You're just not seeing contemporary Japan unless you
get on a plane and go there. So going back a little bit then
to your background in Canada, could you tell me a little bit
about where you grew up? I grew up just outside of
Vancouver, neighboring city, a suburb really.
And you know, from the age of about 1516 started taking

(07:47):
pictures downtown Vancouver. And in those days it was a big
trip for a young person going from the suburbs to the city.
Vancouver was a small city and is a small city, but if you are
from the suburbs, it was the only city you're going to know
about. So I started making pictures

(08:09):
downtown of the people who lived, you know, in the kind of
a rougher, more blue collar, youknow, port town kind of
environment, you know, the, the kind of place that your parents
told you to stay away from basically.
And, you know, in those days, Vancouver's relationship with

(08:33):
the surrounding landscape and environment, So the mountains in
the ocean, that was the economy of the city in those days, you
know, lumber, fishing port, a big port for shipment and
transshipment to Asia. You know, subsequently, it's
become a global real estate destination like so many

(08:57):
attractive cities. But in those days, it was a
small place nobody had ever heard of.
Yeah, it's interesting. The reason I ask that is
reflecting on my own background.As I mentioned before, I'm from
a small town called Hastings in New Zealand on the East Coast,
and it's a farming town, so I'm the head of Tonga Plains.
There's this kind of broad expanse of farmland and apples

(09:21):
and dry stock and this kind of classic agrarian story.
And for me, coming to Tokyo, to a city that is just concrete and
skyscrapers and endless people and civilization, it was quite a
shock. And I, I just wonder whether
that background for you and growing up in the suburbs of

(09:43):
Vancouver, if that maybe gave you a different lens to the way
you saw somewhere like Hong Kongor Tokyo the first time?
I don't know. I mean, I liked it from the get
go. I didn't even hardly think about
it. You know, when you're attracted
to something, you just like it and don't necessarily reflect on
the whys of it. And that's maybe even still the

(10:05):
case. So I like that kind of sense of
adventure, you know, the sense of possibility that cities have.
And in the 70s, Hong Kong was a much more vertical city than
Tokyo. Tokyo was a low rise city until
quite recently. In the 70s there were there was

(10:29):
really just a couple clusters ofof high rise buildings, the West
Shinjuku Towers, the skyscrapersthere which were new, and then
the Hibiya Ginza, your actual area in Tokyo, the business
district, those were the only towers.
The rest of the city was flat. That's a good point.
I mean, it is not so much a vertical city as it sprawls out.

(10:53):
And in a sense, here we are one hour South and we are still
effectively within that kind of Tokyo zone.
And and in a philosophical sense, you know, we can take the
train, the Tokyo, your Costco line to get to Tokyo.
And so, yeah, you're right. There is this, this kind of
concrete, sprawling concrete that has sort of come all the

(11:13):
way to the coast here, in contrast to Hong Kong, which is
sort of this ragged island. There's a ragged island and
these skyscrapers sort of jutting out on from it into the
sky, right? So there's sort of a different
quality there. But still, either city, you're
surrounded by people. And this is maybe for me,
certainly this wasn't the case growing up where, you know,

(11:36):
you'd be lucky if you see anybody driving the other way.
And I just wonder, my image of Canada, perhaps, maybe other
parts of Canada more so than Vancouver, is of vast distances
and things being spread out. Yeah, I guess, you know, maybe
Vancouver isn't a little bit of an exception in the sense that

(11:57):
it, you know, it faces the Pacific and it's been it's been
made by people coming into it from other places, like most of
coastal North America, you know,So it it has that sort of
outward facing thing going on like a lot of port cities do.
And you know, to its, to its benefit, I think.

(12:20):
But I think you're right. If you travel not far in the
other direction or inland you you run into flatness and space
and suburbs and boredom basically.
It's interesting to mention portcities because again, before we
were mentioning, I mean, I'm, I'm from Hastings, but I spent

(12:41):
most of my time in Wellington, which is a port city.
Tokyo and Yokosuka are also portcities.
Vancouver, Hong Kong, these places, there's a sense of
liminality, people coming and going, whether it's the airports
or the the seaports, there's this kind of transience.
And certainly a lot of your photographs explore the docks

(13:03):
and and the ships, but also airports, places like Kitek, the
old Hong Kong airport. Tell me about more about that
sort of liminality of these transient spaces.
Well, I think, you know, if you want to travel, these are the
gateways, you know, and it used to be ports before mass consumer

(13:25):
air travel and now it's airports.
So those are the places where that are going to take you from
where you want to get away from,you know, and so they're,
they're these, they're these portals that I, I think are, you
know, they have this charge to them.
For me anyway, it's just a senseof possibility.

(13:46):
And, you know, I, I wanted to photograph it without
intellectualizing it. It's just really simple
attraction. You know, they've all, they've
always been good to me, you knowwhat I mean?
I mean, they've delivered me where I want to go.
And, and so, you know, just justthat, that sense of adventure

(14:08):
that they open up, you know, I, I, I can understand that they
can get routine. If you're flying between, you
know, Los Angeles and Chicago or, you know, Chicago and
Toledo, you know, I mean, if you're doing business and you're
just trying to get through your day, airports are just something

(14:30):
to be gotten through. But if you're travelling because
you want to leave home or explore or whatever, they're,
they're, they're these openings to, to new worlds, you know, And
so they, they have that that charge to them.
Kaitak is a very special example.
That was one of the last of Asia's almost downtown airports.

(14:52):
You know, I mean, a lot of theseairports in their early
versions, they started very close to the city and planes
were smaller and slower. And getting to the airport back
then might have seemed like a a long trip, but comparatively, it
wasn't. It was before they started

(15:13):
building airports on the edges of cities to accommodate this
huge transformation in air travel.
So Kai tech was like that. And in fact, the, you know, the
runway stuck out into the harbour, creating this very
unique approach imperative to the, to, to the, the airport

(15:35):
where you had to fly straight towards a mountain with a big
checkerboard orange and white onit, make a hard right turn at
around 500 feet and you level out about 200 feet over very
dense urban area and then on therunway.
And so that was a, a very special thing.
If you're living in Hong Kong, it's just the airport.

(15:57):
It's just an ordinary thing. But if you've, you know,
travelled a little bit, you, youknow, how unique it is.
And so I always thought it was kind of extraordinary to to have
this thing on the edge of the city.
And especially as I, as I started photographing the Calvin
Walled City, which was nearby, Istarted spending a lot of time
in in that area near the end of the runway at Kaitak and decided

(16:20):
to kind of photograph that as well.
And, you know, it's like one of those things that's right in
front of you and it's been thereforever.
You kind of think, well, I can do this tomorrow or next week
and there's no sense of urgency about it.
But since I was already photographing the walled City
nearby, I started taking a breakfrom that and started looking at

(16:41):
the airport a little bit. Not with any ambition or
anything, but just I, I thought it was fascinating and it was.
It's like so many things, you know, you don't value it until
it's gone. And once the the the termination
date was applied, you know they're going to build a new
airport in the last days of Kai Tech are on the horizon.

(17:03):
Then people started noticing it and making these kind of
personal pilgrimages to say goodbye to it.
So by the last day there was thousands of people around the
airport photographing the last planes as they arrive.
Well, there's some profound imagery associated with the Kai
tech and my own relationship to that place because I believe it

(17:25):
was 1998 that it closed. And this was around about the
time that the handover happened from a year later.
Yeah, you know, from from Britain to China.
And so there's a lot of things bound up in that kind of closure
of the airport, I think metaphorically.
And we see this referenced in film directors like Wang Kawai,

(17:46):
who explored this imagery of airplanes and travel and this
idea of an escape or the kind ofthe imagery associated with
that. And so my own relationship to it
was probably about 2018 actuallysneaking in, I guess you could
say, to the old runway, which was under construction, that
turning into a Conference Center, a ferry terminal.

(18:08):
And there's just one building left, which is the old fire
station where I guess the truckswould be parked for if there was
an emergency. And it was still standing at
that time. And I managed to get in there
with a friend and explore it. And it was this kind of profound
emptiness because you've got this dark stretch of runway

(18:28):
stretching out into the into theharbour of Hong Kong.
Everything else is lit up aroundit.
And sitting on that kind of the edge of the runway and, and
looking out over the ocean was quite a profound moment for me.
And kind of again, this theme ofconnecting the past and the
present sort of really came through there.
And then today, you know, I wentback a couple of months ago and

(18:50):
now it has been completely transformed.
All of that stuff is gone, but it's sort of the closure of one
portal and maybe perhaps the opening of another one in a
sense, right. So I mean, Hong Kong, very
fascinating place. And again, Kowloon Walled City,
which was I believe one of the most, if not the most densely
populated place on Earth. That's.
Yeah, it's funny that that statistic I I think came after

(19:13):
the demolition when people looked at people, meaning urban
planners or architects, looked at the statistics of what was
there and how many people were there and what kind of space and
made that calculation. But during, you know, during the
time I was photographing there that that would it didn't
register like that. The fact that it was like the

(19:34):
most densely populated place on Earth because it it never felt
crowded when you're walking around it in these alleys
between buildings and and yet you know you're you're above you
is a very dense living situation.
I think something you mentioned earlier as well about not
intellectualizing the the process or or the the thought

(19:57):
around these things. I think I understand what you
mean. The the desire to talk about it,
I guess, can often get in the way of actually going and taking
the photo and doing the thing right.
God forbid. Yeah, and I, I sort of see this,
you know, I'm sort of in the middle a little bit where I do
enjoy looking at the trends. I look, I enjoy seeing, you

(20:19):
know, where things are going because certainly things have
changed. But there is a fundamental
practice that you must undertake, which is to put foot
in front of foot and, and, and take the photo, right.
And I'm kind of coming back to that.
I mean, what has been your approach?
You, you photograph cities and people.
You've got this incredible body of work.
What is your approach to going out into the world and trying to

(20:42):
capture it? Well, it's sort of as basic as
it can get, I guess. I think it's curiosity, you
know, I mean, I think I just want to want to see what's out
there and, you know, maybe a sense of like, I, I, I won't
sleep well until I do, you know what I mean?

(21:04):
I mean, you've got to kind of scratch that itch a little bit,
I suppose. Scratch the itch.
I, I think I understand there's knowing that there's something
around the corner. There's something out there that
is waiting and perhaps is waiting just for you.
There's a there's moments that happen, right?
That if you're 5 seconds earlier, 5 minutes later, you're
not going to see that thing happen, right?

(21:26):
Yeah, I, I, I have to say I don't think about it in terms of
missing something, you know, because there'll be something
else. So I don't, I don't worry about
it. It's more like you need, you
need that thing out there to match that thing in here, you
know? So it's sort of like joining
those two things, you know, however you feel about things or

(21:50):
think about things. For me, they're not completed
until I can, in the case of photography, make a picture
about it. You know, I mean, I don't think
it's a whole lot different than writing about it, painting about
it. I'd say filmmaking is maybe a
little bit different in, in the sense that it's a bit, a bit

(22:11):
more collaborative. Usually.
It doesn't need to be, I guess, but you know it, Photography is
pretty basic. You know, you, you, you, you,
you pick up the camera, start making pictures and, you know,
you don't even need to leave your apartment if you're that
kind of photographer, you know, in the sense of you can make a
picture of anything. At some point I, I, I need to go

(22:35):
out into the world and, and, andsort of see what's there.
And, and it's really just, it kind of starts with that.
So I, I, I don't go out looking really to tell a story about a
city or a place. I've ended up there.
I wanted to go there and there'sa there's some level of

(22:58):
fascination. For sure, I think I understand
the, that's what we would say inmedia res.
You're, you're in the middle of the story.
You, you must just go out and, and explore and, and try to
frame it together. As you say, with filmmaking, you
know, there's a plot and there'sthis storyboards and things like
that. But with photography, you're,
you're sort of, it's real time and you just see what happens

(23:20):
and there's a, a serendipity of it, which I, I certainly, I, we
both know what that that feels like, which is quite profound.
But I wanted to come back to this idea of the world in the
sense that things have changed that we were talking before
about the way people see now hasreally changed because everyone
has a smartphone in their hand. And coming back to the 1970s,

(23:43):
these, these trips into Asia andthis unknown world, What was it
like the people you met? Can you paint a picture sort of
what what you felt out here in terms of the way people
approached living and the way they saw the world?
I mean, in one way it's not different.
It's like talking to a stranger,you know, the fact that we're

(24:04):
connected to the Internet and you go up to a stranger and
you're talking to a stranger. I mean, it's all new, right?
And it's all precarious and weird and interesting and who
knows where it can lead, right? You know, So it, it, it's
really, yes, things are different, but no, things
haven't changed also in that, inthat really fundamental way.

(24:28):
That's interesting. I mean, I feel certainly I do
get a sense when I look at your work that perhaps people back
then, if someone was walking around with a camera in their
hand, they would be seen as someone who is curious, someone
who's doing something very interesting.
And there was a kind of a palpable sense that it was, it
was fascinating. Whereas today it's almost the

(24:50):
opposite where if you don't havea phone in your hand and you're
sitting there staring out into space, that is the curiosity
now. And I, I mean, I vaguely recall
the period before smartphones with myself, but certainly it
has become ubiquitous. And no one, you know, and we
just walked from Kamakura station.
So 5000 people almost have been,you know, there's this kind of

(25:12):
great distraction in a sense and.
Yeah, I mean, I, I don't worry about it or think about it too
much. I mean, I think, I think it's, I
think what's happened is that picture making has become a
shared language in the same way reading and writing used to be,

(25:33):
the way we shared and communicated.
And, you know, everybody can read and write, but not
everybody's a writer, right? So everybody can photograph, but
is everybody a photographer? I mean, I think it's very
similar. That's interesting.
I mean, the other piece that beyond the people, the other

(25:55):
thing that just stands out to meis that this period in history,
the the, the difference in lightand today we have LEDs, we have
I think fundamentally a different tonality, especially
with night time. A lot of your work focuses on
night and it's almost impossibleto to show because we've only
got photos of it. We don't have the originals in

(26:17):
the same way, but the colours ofsodium vapour lights or the
mercury arc lights over somewhere like Vancouver in the
1970s feels like it. It was a qualitatively different
experience to what we have today.
And I mean, has this. Is this something you've you've
sort of found or you've noticed with light?
Well, the irony is maybe that you know when when one started

(26:41):
working for magazines, in my case in the mid to late 80s.
And let's say you have finally an assignment for a magazine.
And let's say in this case, it'sfor Fortune magazine.

(27:01):
And all you've got to work with is like a fluorescent office to
photograph somebody. You might like the way the film
turns everything green, but youreditor at Fortune is going to
have a problem with that. And so you learn how to correct
all these things that are now attractive, you know, like how

(27:22):
to get rid of these casts that are now so atmospheric.
I mean, I kind of like the the way things looked a bit green or
very green even, you know, when I started shooting Kodachrome at
night or whatever film. And when you're finally given

(27:44):
this opportunity to be publishedin a well known magazine and
start making even maybe a livingfrom it, you know, you're you're
tasked with trying to get rid ofthis discast.
So you learn about magenta filters and how to put green on
your flash to compensate to match the.
I mean, you know, you start getting into these technical

(28:06):
things to make things look kind of normal.
It's interesting. I mean the the, I mean the.
The other classic example would be of course, Hong Kong with
it's neon, which when I was there last time in Yamati, the,
you know, it was a, it was a mission to find a single piece
of neon light and a single pieceof neon tubing still

(28:26):
illuminated. Yet back when you first there, I
mean, it was everywhere. And that, that profound quality
of light you get from neon fundamentally impacted the way
we imagined the city, right? It's historically seen as the
city of neon lights, whereas that's no longer true.
And I don't know, I find that very interesting how that has

(28:48):
changed, right? Yeah, and it's not just the the
quality of the light, it's, it'slike what it means, you know,
there it has this allure, this kind of attraction, this kind of
maybe even a bit sort of noir salacious, you know, promise of

(29:09):
adult pleasure to neon. You know, if you're growing up
as a kid, that's what it kind ofrepresented, you know, and and
again, you know, when it's everywhere, no one pays
attention to it. It's it's pretty much always
like that. And it's only when things start
to vanish that you start to to value it.

(29:31):
It's interesting you mention the, the, the pleasures of the
night in a sense. And again, you know, walking
down the streets of Yamate, Shanghai St. these, these
different areas of Hong Kong and, you know, you've the, the
market, the day markets have sort of closed up, so to speak.
And the night market has opened,which is girls standing in the

(29:52):
doorway. And the, the, the question
earlier around the way smartphones and this kind of,
you know, always seeing eye of, of, of mobile devices has come
into the world. It, it seems as if it's harder
or it's a different approach to those things that once lived in
the shadows. And, you know, these girls are

(30:13):
all on their phones. There's a connectivity there.
And it seems as if Once Upon a time things could happen and no
one would ever know in a place like that.
Whereas today there's in a sense, there's always a
possibility something's being recorded that, you know, that
text message is being sent. And I just wonder if you've
reflected on that the way, the way we see things now and the

(30:35):
way we, we have a record of whathappened and, and, and that sort
of thing. Yeah, that's changed.
I mean, you know, you, you can't, there's no kind of
guarantee of anonymity anymore, you know, in in the city.
And that's what the city used torepresent was the ability to be
anonymous, you know, and not no one to know who you are.

(31:00):
And so the, the, the nature of being photographed has maybe
changed a little bit, you know, and I think a good way to
experience that is the difference in terms of the
reception you'll get when you ask someone to take their
picture with a phone compared toa camera.

(31:20):
You know, I think you'll find that people find it a little bit
creepy with a phone, yet a camera kind of still somehow
manages to separate it into a different kind of purpose
activity, you know, meaning, youknow, it's it's it's it's
considered less evidence, less in less invasive, less a

(31:43):
violation of something. You know, for how much longer
that's going to continue, I don't know.
But it's still, it still seems to be there.
Yeah, that's interesting. I, I think I know what you mean.
I mean, even in in my travels was was huge tripod and and you
know, lenses and cameras, you know, there is a a sense that
there's, there's some work beingdone.

(32:05):
There's a, there's a project under way in a, in a sense, but
with these, these small squares of light that people sort of
hold up and they don't even really look, they just sort of
reflexively do it. It's this kind of a learned
response that, oh, well, there'ssome food put in front of me and
of course I'm going to take a photo of it.
And this kind of overwhelming creation and these artifacts is

(32:27):
quite interesting. And yet still, as you say,
everyone can read and write, butnot everyone is, is able to
write a profound novel or a profound story.
So there is a still an interplaythere where, but we're sort of
drowning in images now, but still powerful ones come to the
top. It's funny.
I mean, yes, we are. And yet that was also true in

(32:48):
the sort of 70s and 80s. We were considered surrounded by
images on billboards and television.
So it's it's funny. I mean that that seems like such
a innocent, you know, almost frontier time compared to how we
are both surrounded by them and,and making them in, in ways

(33:14):
nobody, nobody really bargained for.
So I wanted to ask you as well. So again, you've got these
profound images of of cities andof cities under transformation.
Your book Phantom Shanghai, for example, showing the
transformation of Shanghai over over the years is quite
phenomenal. But then you've also got these,

(33:35):
these studies of people. And I wanted to ask you that I
was looking through your work just last night and there's one
image of, of, of a woman in particular, Keiko, the woman in
the blue dress. You you refer to her by these
these different names is sometimes my name Keiko,
sometimes as the woman in the blue dress, or sometimes just by
the year 1979 Yoyogi Park. Who was she?

(34:00):
Keiko was a friend, you know, girlfriend, I guess you could
say. I mean, how did people even stay
at stay in touch in those days? We had each other's phone
number, I guess. I mean, I met her in the street
and asked to take her picture. And we started spending time

(34:21):
together and it was exciting to,you know, just meet somebody new
and let's just walk around and take pictures, you know.
And so one day she turned up with, I think it was a pair of
Charles Jordan shoes, the the French designer.
And, you know, so it was an occasion, you know, and I, I

(34:48):
mean, of course you can still dothat, meet someone and go
photographing. It's pretty exciting and
interesting and fun, you know, to just make pictures of
somebody new and lovely. And, you know, I mean, we're
both, what, early 20s? Yeah, that's that idea of just

(35:10):
meeting someone again. I do reflect on this moment
we're in now. Just before at the station,
while I was waiting for you, I was having a chat with somebody.
And, you know, I'm trying to putmyself out there.
But it does seem, I mean, peoplehave retreated into the device.
And so to be the one to, you know, strike up a conversation.
I mean, it is if it ever took courage, it takes courage now.

(35:34):
And I find that quite interesting.
And the profound people you can meet through simply saying hello
again, I reflect on maybe how that has changed.
Certainly here in Asia, it's it's we don't maybe communicate
in the same way perhaps. But what do you think?

(35:55):
Well, I think it's just it's what you want and how serious
you are about it and how to be at the same time light about
what you're being serious about.So you don't, you know, scare
people. Do you find consider yourself a
serious person do you think or more of a playful?
I'm serious about the pictures Imake.
I try to be, you know. Yeah, it's interesting.

(36:16):
I mean, you, you're working withmagazines.
You were sent on assignment to various places.
And I see you. I mean, in many cases you were
there. June 1989, Chinnaman Square,
Beijing. You were there.
Well, in fact, that was probablyone of the worst decisions of my
journalistic career. I I'd been in Beijing for weeks

(36:41):
before June 4th, the day of the the killings, and I went there
for a different reason. I think it was a business
magazine assignment. And then the demonstration
started happening. So I stayed on.
And that went on for weeks and weeks as the students came out

(37:02):
of the universities, went to thesquare, and as ordinary people
came out of curiosity and or support.
And there'd been a first attemptto clear the square in May, and
that was kind of stopped in its tracks by ordinary people who
literally just stopped army trucks in the streets.

(37:25):
They retreated and then we're now up to about June 1st and I
decided, you know what, I'm going to go back to Hong Kong
for a couple days, kind of buy more film and maybe ship what
I've got and, you know, come back later.
And then June 4th happened whileI was in Hong Kong.
So I went back the next day and into the aftermath of it.

(37:48):
But I I wasn't there for the thenight of the killings.
Yeah, that's interesting. I mean immediately as if
something happened off stage, you were there before and
immediately after. But even that in itself for me,
you know, and this is before my time.
It's, it's fascinating to have aconnection to these events,
which have, I mean, become, I mean, they are incredibly

(38:10):
important historical events, right?
And to, and to have a kind of tangible connection to that I, I
find very interesting because again, today I, I feel like in a
lot of cases we, we consume things second hand, we, we
delegate. But to actually have the first
hand experience of something, it's, it can help help round out

(38:31):
maybe what is otherwise quite black and white opinions on
things. You know, actually, you know,
these are the little moments andyou've got photographs of, of
some of the students, some of the people there.
You've got one photograph of, I think, some soldiers reading a
newspaper or being shown a newspaper.
And these kinds of moments help flesh out the nuance of what is
a complex story. Ryan, Yeah.

(38:57):
You know the the difference today is that you need less and
less that kind of person from the outside to come parachuting
in. In this case from the West into
a non West Country to to show what's going on to let's call it

(39:18):
the folks back home, you know, or other other news consumers of
a of a similar world view. Nowadays everybody's recording
Everything Everywhere, all the time.
And whatever happens, there's usually video of it, not just

(39:41):
photographs, but video, you know, So these that way of
looking at a situation and summing it up in a single
picture, maybe is maybe is becoming a little bit, I don't
say irrelevant, but just disconnected, you know, it, It

(40:02):
used to be that a photographer would try to understand a
situation and make a picture, a still photograph to convey
what's going on. Now with video running non-stop
constantly, you know is that is that skill?
Is that conceptual framework needed anymore?

(40:24):
It's interesting because when I look at your again, your body of
work, it, it strikes me that I, I, I wonder whether this is even
possible anymore that you can have these iconic images of
whether it's the soldiers in Tiananmen Square reading the
newspaper or the girl in the blue dress.
These, these images that just that tell this profound story

(40:44):
that that's behind all of them. But today, you know, is it only
for going to be an imitation of an earlier time to try and do
something like that and to, you know, put on the green cast of
the sodium of the mercury lightsor to put on the grain of film
and kind of to reproduce the thekind of friction of the the

(41:07):
earlier days in a sense, you know, is it just make believe?
Yeah, I don't know the answer tothat.
I mean, but I, I think it's curious how like, nostalgia is
so baked into so many things now.
Like I, I find it funny that digital cameras look like
cameras from the 70s, you know, with the shutter rewind knobs,

(41:30):
you know, as if they're actuallydoing something.
I mean, I find that extraordinarily kind of odd, you
know, So, you know, nostalgia isit's, it's seductive and it's
attractive. But I, I think, you know, for,

(41:53):
for me, I think it's a really dangerous path to go down in
terms of self consciously makingthings that reference the past
like that. You know, I think when you're
out in the world making pictures, you're looking for
things that connect or don't connect, you know, little breaks

(42:16):
in the scene in front of you, you know, things registering
just a bit off. And then why is that?
You know, you know, with, with nostalgia, it's all, it's all
there already. You just, you're attracted to
something from before and eitheryou make a picture that looks
like that. And so I guess it's comforting,

(42:38):
interesting if you've never beenthrough it.
But if, you know, I lived through the 70s, you know, 80s,
like why, why would I make a picture that looks like the 70s
or the 80s? You know, I mean, I, I don't
need to, you know, having said that, as a young person, one of
the things I first noticed when I went downtown Vancouver in my

(43:02):
case was how certain places werelocked in a completely different
period of time. You know, you enter a pool hall,
for example, and it's like you're in the 1950s, like
nothing's changed. The way the guys are dressed and
groomed, it's right out of the 1950s.
And so, you know, as a, as a young person, you know that that

(43:25):
was attractive like this, this, this out of time place that you
didn't know was there and you just kind of discovered it.
And so you know that you're, you're, you're seeing this other
world and that was photographable, you know, before
my time. So it was interesting, but I

(43:51):
wouldn't, I don't think I'd be making, I don't know, a, a book
today of places that I discovered that looked like the
1990s. Like I can't even separate the
90s from the 2000s. You know what I mean?
It's like it's too late in my life.
They, they blur together too much.

(44:12):
And I wasn't paying attention tothings in that way as a young
person. One year is a long time.
So like the difference from the music from 1973 to 74 to 75,
It's, it's kind of etched on your young consciousness that
you take into later life, you know?
So I, I, I bear it within. I don't need to go back to it,

(44:35):
you know? Yeah, I think I understand.
I, I, I think we're perhaps similar in that regard.
I, I mean, I am afflicted with the fatal illness of nostalgia
myself. And I, again, growing up in
rural New Zealand, which is justalready 10 years behind
everywhere else. And then, you know, it's at the
bottom of the world and you've got this, this kind of longing

(44:59):
for the past and the, and the unchanging hills and landscape.
I I find coming to somewhere like Tokyo, which is always in
this state of change. You know, there's always
buildings getting put up and pulled down that went first
encountering that was, was quite, quite profound.
And coming back to the New Zealand case, it's also a very

(45:20):
young country. So we don't have these, you
know, ancient histories. And so there's this kind of
temporal malaise that I always found myself in.
And necessarily I started photographing things and trying
to pull on threads. But as you say, I mean, to, to
put it on and to make believe with it.
It's perhaps coming from a genuine place, but it's not,

(45:44):
it's not reflecting the truth that, you know, something like
the smell of cigarettes. That was, you know, soon.
I vaguely recall in the 90s, youknow, that was still a thing.
But today no one smokes. You don't see that.
And this, this pool, pool hall you're describing, I, I can only
imagine it smelled like cigarettes.
And so no one's going to go and create, recreate that, you know,

(46:06):
and there's sort of these other senses and these other pieces of
it, right, that maybe don't comethrough.
Yeah. You know, I think what you're,
you know, what you're talking about maybe is just this
personal world we carry around with us, you know, inside us

(46:27):
that everything is filtered through or can be filtered
through as you look out into like the immensity of now, you
know, and maybe you need that, otherwise it's just going to be
too overwhelming or something, you know, I'm not sure.
But Japan's quite an amazing place right now to be because of

(46:54):
its change, having lost the mantle of being our shared
future. You know, this this notion which
is kind of almost quaint now that Japan would somehow be this
futuristic place where we're allgoing to do what the Japanese

(47:17):
have done in terms of technologyand living and whatnot.
It seems almost quite now. But for a while, that's what we
all kind of thought, you know, when the yen was strong and
Japan had this economic prowess that it no longer does, you
know, and replaced somewhat by, by China today as the the latest

(47:39):
pure competitor, you know. And so going around Japan now,
it's really quite unreal to to go to these places, these
smaller towns and cities where there's maybe no reason to go.
And you see these places that have kind of topped out in the
late 80s or early 90s and not changed much.

(48:01):
I mean, there's a certain charm to it, but a kind of a sadness
to as young people have emptied out and no need to change the
window display since 1993 kind of thing.
You know, so a lot of these small towns in Japan are like
that and they're, they're kind of mesmerizing.
You know, this to to time travelto these spots.

(48:22):
I know exactly what you mean. This, this old Akhtagawa story,
Dashomon, which is obviously thefamous, famous film, but the
actual original Dashomon story is about this, this kind of gate
at the entrance to a city. And it's, you know, hundreds of

(48:43):
years ago, but the city had fellon hard times.
And there's this old woman who's, who's living near the
gate and she's picking the hair out of the corpses to make wigs
from. And this imagery of this, of
this woman picking, you know, picking the hair out of these
corpses and, and to make wigs. And this kind of, I can

(49:03):
visualize the, the candlelight and the kind of the cold winters
and, and just this kind of austerity.
And I'm, I'm kind of reminded ofthese, these kinds of images,
right? There's, you know, a rural town
in Yamanashi in the hills somewhere that was just, yeah,
shuttered. And there's kind of an old
grandma sort of pottering around.

(49:25):
And there's a sort of Monono awade is obviously the classic
Japanese term for it. There's a pathos of being that
it once was perhaps somewhere there could be a future that
could be exciting, but now it's just sort of grey and ambling
and perhaps a little bit cold. And this is, this is a profound

(49:45):
thing to kind of encounter, you know, this sort of feeling, this
pathos of, of being right. And I mean, that's something
that's been talked about when itcomes to Japan for many years.
And perhaps maybe the bubble erawas the exception.
And in fact, we've got just thislong history of that.
Yeah. You know, you, you have to kind

(50:09):
of bear in mind just how out there Japan was in the late 80s
and into the 90s before the things kind of flatlined.
It was going to take over the world, you know?
It's interesting you say that aswell, because your other book,
Phantom Shanghai had a foreword by William Gibson, fellow

(50:31):
Canadian sci-fi author, and certainly Neuromancer, arguably
one of the first cyberpunk novels set in Japan back in the
80s. I believe he wrote that.
And that was, you know, talking about this future you describe
of these, these huge Japanese corporations and virtual reality

(50:52):
and, and cyberspace and all of these concepts that came through
from that book. Yet it ended up it was, it was,
it was Shanghai that he wrote the foreword for in this case,
which was again, the, the, you know, changing of, of the guard
in that sense of the future thatwas to come.
In the case of Japan, it never really came though.
We never really got that, did we?
I don't think so, yeah. I mean, I think, you know,

(51:13):
certain things might have been, you know, shared across cultures
for a while, but no. And, and you know, the, the
reason, I mean, just to talk about William Gibson, you know,
the, the reason I so wanted him to contribute to Phantom in
Shanghai was to not have that book and how it's considered the

(51:40):
photographs in it. To not have them like go down
memory lane, you know, to not beabout nostalgia, to be about
this, this future that is, that is kind of rushing towards us,
you know, and, and how and how Shanghai represented that in the
in, in the sense in the case of Shanghai at the time, you know,

(52:04):
you still had the massive landscape in Shanghai of the
early 20th century city, still very much a feature of what
Shanghai looked like. And, and again, Shanghai was
very particular, though not unlike other cities where
similar things happened. So think about Havana post post

(52:29):
59 when Castro took over. Think about Berlin under Soviet
occupation, where the capitalistgrid gets separated from the
place, you know, And so you havethis modern city where there's
no more building development forprofit.

(52:50):
So the state in whatever capacity it has will maintain
it, but you're not going to haveblocks pulled down to build
skyscrapers and shopping centersand whatnot.
So these places kind of start toage and weather.
And, you know, in, in the 80s, Asia was booming.

(53:10):
You know, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei, Singapore, Hong Kong, of
course, you know, everywhere in the region is, is urbanizing,
going vertical. And Chinese cities are just
flatlining because, you know, you're just coming out of the
Cultural Revolution. Capitalism hasn't derived these

(53:30):
factories from the United States, and other Western
countries aren't being built in the special economic zones.
And so these cities are just kind of shells of what they used
to be. And everything's is being
repurposed in ways never intended.
Like a house built for one family now has 20 or 30 or 40
families living in it. So that was Shanghai, you know,

(53:51):
post 49 up until the 80s, and, you know, Deng Xiaop being
directed Shanghai to catch up, it had been actively held back
for its role as a foreign place,a symbol of imperialism,
basically. And so Shanghai did start
catching up like gangbusters. And so they just started

(54:12):
leveling whole neighborhoods. And that's when I moved to
Shanghai, and that was going on.And so there's this, on one
hand, you're kind of mourning the loss of this incredible
period architecture, either Western, Chinese or combination
of both. And in most cases, and there's a
real sense of loss, but also this sense of, Oh my God, like,

(54:35):
what? What's going on here?
Like, you know, I mean, you're having skyscrapers and
demolition rubble, like almost in the same physical space.
You know, this is kind of unreal.
And so I really wanted that perspective of like this future,
rushing towards this place afterhaving been denied it for so

(54:55):
long. I had never considered that.
I, I think when I looked at those images, I was looking at
the, the beautiful art Deco communes and these lane houses
that were getting demolished with this kind of ominous glow
of the new city in the distance.But the way you've just
described it, I mean, I, I, I think I understand now this,

(55:17):
this future is bursting at the seams to come and to, and it's
in a sense in, in, in the vein of modernity, right?
You know, it's coming and, and you know, everyone needs to jump
on board, right? And.
That's we'll get out of the. Way yeah, we'll get out of the
way and and I think this this now takes us to your current
project, perhaps in a sense was snack Sakura, Greg, which these

(55:43):
iconic establishments which maybe we can talk about the
snack bars because they represent in a sense both a
place of refuge, sort of a a time slip where you can have a
drink, a place to meditate on perhaps the past and the future.
So what? What is a snack bar?

(56:03):
Well, the snack is a small drinking place that there really
isn't an equivalent, an exact equivalent of it anywhere else.
I mean, I think given all the choice you have in a place like
Tokyo or any big Japanese city of where to go out for a drink,
beautiful bars, restaurants, stylish or even a kind of like

(56:28):
the dive category that might, you know, linger and have a
young customer base who likes that kind of thing.
Snacks are kind of separate fromall that.
They're kind of, well, they usedto be And you know, maybe that's
changing, but I don't think so yet.

(56:52):
But a snack I think for most younger people is considered
like the most boring place to gofor a drink unless you want to
sing karaoke. I mean, they're, they're kind of
a refuge for salary men, guys tostop on their way home or go
with Co workers after after work.

(57:15):
Interestingly, I discovered while working on this project,
the the category of the snack was invented as the Tokyo 1964
Olympics were approaching. And the authorities are worried
about Westerners, foreigners being exposed to salacious
Japanese nightlife, you know, clubs, sex industry sorts of

(57:40):
things. And so they kind of controlled
it somewhat. They decided to make all the
bars and clubs close at midnight.
But the bar owners got together and said, well, what if we're
not exactly a bar? What if we have some something
to eat, some kind of food? Why don't we make this category
called a snack? And we'll have like snacks like

(58:02):
peanuts or Oden or something to,to offer the customers.
So this new category is dreamed up in order to stay open late.
And interestingly enough, like snacks now are not open late.
They close 11-12 one, maybe. You know, they're not late night
places at all. They've just kind of they've

(58:23):
completely lost their fashionable luster.
It was there for a while when they first appeared.
And now, you know, I mean, they're, they're places where
middle-aged guys usually would go to drink in most cases in
smaller towns and cities where there might not be the same
choice. Well, there, there won't be the
same kind of choice of nightlifethere, there might actually be

(58:44):
nothing else except a snack. And in these places, a snack
functions more like a traditional pub where all ages
might go there. But in bigger cities, they're,
they're mostly pretty simple, a bar counter with some seats,
some stools, maybe a booth or two.

(59:05):
They can also be more like Hostess club kind of places
where you have a, a menu system,you know, X ¥1000 for an hour to
sit and drink with somebody who's pouring your drinks for
you. And you pay by the hour to sit
and do that in those kind of places.
But a, a snack traditionally is pretty simple.

(59:27):
You pay for your drink plus somecounter snacks, sit there as
long as you want, have this muchresidual as you want to drink.
But they're they're they're interesting for me because they
kind of represented something not very fashionable.
And I was doing another project and I started noticing that

(59:48):
every town seemed to have a place called Snak Sakura.
So Sakura cherry blossom, basically the most boring name
for anything in Japan, right? You know, you see, you see it
everywhere. There's Sakura Clinic, Sakura
dry cleaners, Sakura car washes and whatever.
And you're quite nice. Japan Airlines, Sakura Lounge,

(01:00:10):
you know, if you're flying business class.
So it's a common, hyper common word in Canada, for example, the
equivalent might be Maple Leaf Pub.
You know, like some place you have no interest in going, right
so. But I started noticing as I went
from town to town doing something else, that every town

(01:00:31):
seemed to have a place called Snaksakra.
So I started, I think I made onetrip to just see if it was true.
I didn't even do any research. And some places had them, some
places didn't. But for the most part, I
thought, yeah, this, this, this is actually, this could be
something. And then I, I checked with the
old Japan Snack Owners Association to try to get some
data about names and it turned out that, yes, Snacksakra was

(01:00:56):
the most common name for their, their members.
And so I just started going fromtown to town looking for these
places, started doing a little bit of research on looking on,
you know, Google Earth, going through entertainment districts
and looking up at the signage and, you know, Internet
searches. But not all these places have a

(01:01:16):
web presence, you know, and if you, if you maybe saw something
on, you know, Google Maps or Google Earth, by the time you
get there, the name might have changed or the buildings gone.
So you have to do, in my case, acombination of kind of, you
know, research and just walking around.
Yeah. Well, it's, it's interesting

(01:01:38):
what I've found having been in these kinds of institutions
several times, I was struck manyof them don't have windows.
Many of them are sort of hidden away, these sort of small narrow
spaces with maybe a couple of seats if you're lucky.
The the iconic image of the mamasan who sort of maybe Once

(01:02:00):
Upon a time it was different, but certainly nowadays usually
it is an older woman who's running the show.
That's right. Yeah, the way you feel welcomed
into it because often, not always, but sometimes, you know,
you will need someone to introduce you to it or you'll
need to kind of know that it's there.
It's not necessarily well advertised, but once you're in
that space, it's sort of its ownlittle world, its own universe

(01:02:23):
that extends from the back wall to the door at the front.
And that's about it. And everything can happen,
whether it's karaoke or, or deepphilosophical conversations.
And in a sense, the, the, the, the stereotypically cloistered
Japanese persona kind of comes out and people start talking
with you and many things can happen.

(01:02:44):
And it's, it's kind of, again, alittle bit of a time slip as
well, because often the furniture can be quite dated.
You've got maybe some tape on the leather chair where it's
splitting. You've got this smell of
cigarettes just drenched into the into the wooden counter and
these kinds of visceral kind of sensory perceptions of the place

(01:03:05):
kind of Harkins back to an earlier era, right?
So in that sense it is a little bit of a time slip.
There it can be. I mean, what I what I found was
that most places had evolved, you know, over over the years.
It's now, it's not Sakura. It might have been something
else before. It could be something else
later. And I actually found that any

(01:03:27):
dated quality of the place was actually the exception rather
than than, than sort of the, the, the normal scene, because
most of these places have had have gone through, you know,
various iterations. And there's there, there tends
not to be a lot of considerationabout what goes into a snack in
in a lot of cases. I mean, a lot of them are just

(01:03:50):
very basic and it no one is has given a lot of thought to the
design or the ambience. And you know, considering that
we're talking, you know, Japan, Tokyo, I mean, these sort of
things can matter a lot. And often do you know what kind
of bar you're making has a huge impact on, you know, attracting

(01:04:13):
clientele. But for the snacks, it's sort of
a different purpose. You know, you the, the etiquette
in the snack, as as you mentioned, you know, you, they
tend to be small and 99% of the cases there's no window.
That's kind of a feature of the stack.
So you, you're in this enclosed space where you can't see into
it or out of it. You open the door, usually a

(01:04:35):
little bell Dings. And the, the etiquette in the
snack is, is not to walk in and just sit down, but it's, it's a
sort of a, a nod to the, the autonomy of the Mama son and her
place that you're, you asked to be basically invited in.
You kind of present yourself at the door and ask to be invited

(01:04:56):
to sit down. You can't just, shouldn't, I
think just walk in and sit down.That's kind of, that's really
not how it's done. I mean, it's, it's a way that
signals the Mama son has a, has the right to choose her
customers, you know, and you're being invited into, into her
space or there are men who run these places too.

(01:05:16):
So that's the etiquette. You walk in and basically say is
it OK or pause body language is it OK?
And the Mama son invites you to sit down and and you do.
Yeah, it's interesting as well. The not quite a snack, but
certainly the Golden Guy district of Shinjuku, which you
would be familiar with in a sense, has gone through this,

(01:05:38):
this, this change where it has become.
I mean, it is a tourist spot. It always kind of was in a
sense, but now there is no locals there in a sense and
these places have had to either adapt or or begin to work with
that. But with the snacks in other
parts of of Japan and other parts of Tokyo, they can still
be in their milieu. They can kind of hideaway in

(01:05:59):
between buildings, these narrow often underground or or deep
inside a building somewhere. And they can kind of hideaway
from the changes happening in the rest of the city, perhaps.
Yeah. I mean, you know, you're you're
likely to find a snack on the upper floors of entertainment
buildings in any big Japanese city, as well as in in the

(01:06:21):
alleys where development might not have hit yet.
You know, used to be around train stations.
See, the back alleys around the stations had these drinking
places. And I think all of all of Japan,
all of Japan's nightlife kind ofemanated from that.
From the train stations on your Instagram profile, you write in

(01:06:42):
the West, formerly in the East, and you're now living back in
Canada. How do you reflect on all of
these years in Asia? Questions of home, of belonging?
What? Yeah.
What do? What do you think about that?
Well, it's a luxury, isn't, isn't it?
To be able to choose your home? I mean, what, what, what greater
luxury is there, you know, than to be able to have a choice of

(01:07:05):
where to live and go. And we're very lucky to be able
to do that. So I, I, I just consider it a,
an amazing situation to be and to have a passport, sufficient

(01:07:25):
funds to be able to at least getyourself to where you want to go
and, and, and maybe stay. So, I mean, I never, I never
expected or cared about any formal sense of being accepted.
I mean, what, you know, maybe maybe just being ignored is, is

(01:07:49):
enough. I mean, it's great actually.
Yeah, understood. Well, look, it's been great to
talk about your work, your, yourhistory, your story.
Greg, very exciting time with your upcoming project.
If if you've got have you got anywhere you would like to send
listeners? Where would you like to point
them to to find out more about your work?

(01:08:11):
Oh, the easiest place I guess isInstagram at Greg for a day.
That's probably the the go to place.
OK. And what, what does that mean to
beat Greg for a day? I don't know.
All right. That's Greg Gerard.
Thank you very much. Thanks.
Thank you for listening. I am Cody Allingham, and that
was the transformation of value.If you would like to support

(01:08:34):
this show, please consider making a donation either through
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think may enjoy it. And you can always e-mail me at
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