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REVIEWS OF PHANTOM SHANGHAI
NEW YORKER
For decades after the Communist victory, in 1949, Shanghai remained largely intact, preserved by benign neglect, its architecture a rich legacy of the polyglot collision of Asian and Western cultures that formed the city. Since the nineties, however, Shanghai's metamorphosis into a towering mega-city has been an ineluctable and pitiless process of paving over nearly all previous traces a phenomenon stunningly documented in Greg Girard's garish, poetic, infinitely sad photographs. In an indignant introduction, William Gibson calls them Documents of the Gone World. Seeming to have arrived in each case minutes before the bulldozers, Girard shows us here a pair of stone lions sitting amid the rubble of a condemned factory, there a gorgeous mansion in the old French concession, long ago subdivided for worker housing, and last occupied by members of the very crew charged with knocking it down.
New Yorker review by Jaime Wolf
TIME MAGAZINE - DISAPPEARING ACT
Several years ago I was strolling through an old neighborhood of Shanghai when I spied a scrum of men carrying something out of a darkened doorway. It was a rattan chair on which sat a very agitated granny. She was one of the last holdouts refusing to leave her house, which was scheduled to be torn down to make way for Xintiandi, Shanghai's sprawling outdoor shopping-and-restaurant development. As she was borne out, like some parody of an imperial courtesan in a eunuch-shouldered sedan chair, the Mao-suited woman kept screaming a phrase in Shanghainese. I asked a friend what it meant. "Remember history," she told me.
Shanghai's architectural history, an East-West hybrid combining the modest sturdiness of a Chinese trading town with the showier Art Deco ambitions of the foreigners who began descending in the 19th century is fast disappearing. Helping us remember this remarkable urban legacy before the last of the wrecking crews strikes is Canadian photographer Greg Girard, a longtime resident of China's largest metropolis, whose new book Phantom Shanghai was published last month. Many of the historic buildings that Girard documents forlorn carcasses cowering below towers of concrete and glass have already been demolished. Understanding this lends the photos a nostalgic resonance, a sense that we are witnessing what novelist William Gibson, in his foreword to the book, calls "the actual vanishing, the hideous 21st-century urban hat trick."
No city stops growing, of course, unless it runs out of money or relevance and Shanghai boasts plenty of both. But each time I return, my favorite place in China seems less itself. Many residents, too, look disoriented: Wasn't a noodle shop here just a week ago, or a tailor's atelier there, or a row of lane houses just around the corner?
Girard accentuates this sense of dislocation by taking most of his pictures in those crepuscular moments when Shanghai reveals its private self. Behind the blinding economic razzle-dazzle and throngs of striving entrepreneurs, the city is defined by its intimate sense of neighborhood, what Girard calls its "lived-in-ness." Walk Shanghai's alleyways at night and inhale the smell of braised pork wafting out of a communal kitchen, hear the slap of a shuttlecock struck by a pajama-clad girl, catch a glimpse of a chandelier in a threadbare bedroom once part of a ballroom in some silk merchant's mansion, now subdivided to house a dozen families. Yet I know this Shanghai my Shanghai, Girard's Shanghai is vanishing. All that will be left are these phantom images, a visual elegy to a city that is lost.
TIME review by Hannah Beech
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1617169,00.html
THE NATIONAL POST - LOST METROPOLIS
By the time Greg Girard's magnificent portraits of Shanghai are seen, China's largest city will have already become a completely different place
"You're looking for ever more intimate things," photographer Greg Girard explains. "Ever closer, deeper, more private, more personal."
This is how he created Phantom Shanghai, his new book about the marginalized people and places in the largest city of the People's Republic of China. The pictures tell the stories of the nooks and crannies modernization hasn't yet touched: building rubble beneath fluorescent skylines, or a man using an outdoor faucet on crumbled concrete opposite a subdivision's carefully manicured lawns.
"Violence is not the wrong word to describe what happens when there are no impediments to change," says the 52-year-old of communism's urban development crush. "There is a sense that this place is disappearing-- a place I very much wanted to explore."
Girard, from Barnaby, B.C., says his camera has always led him to faraway worlds. "In Grade 11 and 12, I'd get a cheap hotel room on weekends in the bad part of town and take photographs," he says. "That journey I took from the suburbs to downtown was as big as any I took after that." Inspired by Graham Green's The Quiet American, Girard first sought out Asia in 1974 as a teacher in Japan. He made his first visit to Hong Kong in 1982, and despite a two year sojourn in Manhattan, he has spent most of his adult life in the East. "In the early '80s, Shanghai had the sense of a dilapidated museum; the architecture was gorgeous, but it was like the place wasn't connected to the rest of the world."
Girard, who calls shooting for Time, Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine is "day job," published his first book of photography in 1993. Kowloon Walled City was done in collaboration with architectural photographer Ian Lambot, and would mark a turning point in the artist's career.
"I ended up liking his photographs better than mine," says Girard, who lives with his wife in Shanghai and has a 26-year-old son back in Vancouver. "I found that by photographing not the people but the spaces, it revealed as much if not more about how people lived."
With financing from Magenta Publishing for the Arts, Girard had a vision for his next project, one that he would work on for more than nine years. Shooting in medium-range from his tripod, he photographed Shanghai, that dilapidated museum, which almost 20 years after his first visit, was in the crux of a radical change.
"It was as if once that tap was turned on to modernize Shanghai, there was no slowing down," says Girard, who sought out the wet hallways and bare light bulbs, sofas missing their stuffing and a slit water jug doubling as the mailbox of a tin-roofed shack in Phantom Shanghai. "I saw something worth preserving," he says.
National Post Review by Ben Kaplan
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=ceb4139b-051e-437c-9d97-ea6493b16e92&k=45928
THE STAR - AN URBAN FABRIC REDUCED TO TATTERS
They loom, desolately incandescent, over the city that was. Glowing spikes claw at the sky, reaching ever upward, wilfully ignorant of what lies beneath.
This is modern Shanghai, the most hyperbolic evidence of China's frenzied growth in a nation rife with such extremes. Radiant towers, monuments to the new so important here root themselves deeply in the city's urban fabric, which, simply by their prodigious sprouting, they have reduced to tatters.
Greg Girard eschews their glow for the shadows below. Since 2001, Girard, a Canadian photographer, has been documenting the rush to modernity in a city pursuing it at all costs.
Phantom Shanghai, his just-released book, reveals his priority, as he casts his gaze downward: entire neighbourhoods razed, hundreds of thousands of residents displaced, centuries erased, the slate wiped clean in moments.
In his pictures, a row of abandoned two-storey homes, remnants of another era, squat in a rubble field as a science-fiction skyline "arc-lit mesas," as William Gibson has described them spike up behind them.
A drab, narrow street, one of a warren-like network in the city's Bund district, is cast in the chilly fuchsia glow of the 468-metre-tall Oriental Pearl TV tower, a spindly finger fitted with bulbous pink knuckles near the base and top.
A still-lived-in old brick house , liberated from its once-attached neighbours, now adrift in a sea of kempt rubble, is surrounded by condo towers as their owners contemplate their new surroundings from beaten armchairs: holdouts, refusing to go.
Girard's images have a beguiling and deceptive stillness. They can seem mannered, with a put-on veneer of intentional artifice. Surreally, though and owing, no doubt, to the extreme circumstances of the subject matter the pictures are straight documentary, neither staged nor retouched.
Long exposures, most of them taken at dusk, capture the dying city the city below and its still-beating heart: washes of warm light spilling from doorways; bright rainbows of plastic drying on the concrete ground; bright fuchsia branches reaching up over a dreary wall.
But it is an unsettling stillness. The sense is of the condemned awaiting the gallows.
Shanghai boasts more than 4,000 skyscrapers double the number in New York, and close to 10 million square feet of commercial space. It's not just the volume that's heart-stopping, but the pace. In 2000, there was only 400,000.
Since 1999, hundreds of thousands of people have been relocated, hundreds of acres of cityscape demolished, history and memory buried in tonne after tonne of rubble.
As with so much in the new China industrialization, freeway-building, the explosion of car culture and mass-consumerism its model is mid-century North America. After decades of communism, there was that much catching up to do.
But as is also true in China, the applied model is amplified hundred-fold. In the middle of the last century, most cities in North America embraced the Modernist notion of urban renewal: bulldoze old tracts of cityscape and make way for a new reality, based not on foot, but in cars, not on eclectic neighbourhoods, but master-planned cities with sectors divided by function: working, living, shopping, playing.
In the years that followed, the awakening that urbanity, community, history, authenticity and sense of place were desirable human features was a rude one indeed.
For a city like Shanghai, it is a curious fate. Since at least the 19th century, it has been as much a metaphor as a city, synonymous with the Eastern exotic, and the very real centre of international culture and commerce. The British owned it, briefly, and stayed; the French adopted a portion. The United States, wary of the Brits gaining an advantage in international trade, established extraterritoriality there in 1844.
Others, like thousands of Russians, Indians and many more, just went in pursuit of fortune; Shanghai, after New York and London, was for a time the third-largest commercial centre on Earth.
The collision of cultures helped build the myth of Shanghai as an idealized early dream of international cross-fertilization, a proto-cosmopolitan realm that would be a harbinger of things to come in our increasingly global culture.
Building types were a curious mix of traditional Chinese and imported European styles, as was the sometimes loose morality that pervaded the city, both in myth and reality a proto-Sin City brimming with sophisticated vice that cartoon-version Vegas could hardly hope to match.
Girard is in Toronto this week for a reception for the book of his images. The title Phantom Shanghai is apt. Shiny new Shanghai, with its dull, blinding glow, is bound to be haunted by the city it has so efficiently destroyed. Save for a few glossy preservation projects, the city for what makes a city, but the humanity it contains is destined to be the city that was.
It's almost unimaginable to refer to an entire city in the past tense. Cities are born. They grow. They change, sometimes radically. They rarely die.
Exceptions exist Pompeii, for example, consumed by Vesuvius. Except in China, of course, where cities not portions or pieces, entire cities àhave been executed, sacrificed to the great god of progress that screams through the country, from urban to rural, mountaintop to river valley, with increasing speed and intensity.
In the Yangtze Valley, 14 entire cities now lie under 175 metres of water. Fully populated cities, most of them ancient, some of them brimming with historical significance, a built history of an ancient culture. Residents of these 14 cities were ordered to dismantle their homes, brick by brick, and start making for higher ground, where new cities better cities, they were told would be waiting.
In June 2003, the Three Gorges Dam was completed, and the rising water engulfed all 14, ancient urbanities drowned in the floodwaters of modern ambition.
Underwater now, they are easier to forget. Shanghai is less so. But by the end, which is coming sooner than most in the West can imagine, it will be no less engulfed. Earlier this year, 18,000 families were forcibly relocated to make way for Expo in 2010. The theme, according to its website, is "Better City, Better Life."
Girard includes at least one picture of that "Better Life," seen here below at left: A man washing himself at a public sink next to a man-made pond. Just across, a small cluster of generic suburban houses sit anchored in a tidy expanse of bright green lawn.
It is oddly Calgarian-seeming or Atlantan. It is certainly not Shanghainese, certainly not of myth, reputation, or history. But none of these things seem to matter anymore.
Girard's pictures are indeed of ghosts homes, neighbourhoods, and a city that was, cast adrift in memory, but no longer with any basis in mortar, prone to occasional hauntings, but soon, never more to be seen.
The Star review by Murray Whyte