Cities in focus: 50+ years of Pacific Rim photographs by Surrey’s Greg Girard
Published 11:42 am Friday, August 7, 2026
Greg Girard and others had the daunting job of assembling five decades of his photographs for a retrospective exhibition that sheds light on people and street scenes of Vancouver, Hong Kong, Shanghai, San Francisco and other Pacific Rim cities.
A Surrey resident since 2019, Girard has more than 160 of his compelling images showcased at The Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, in what’s called the first major institutional survey of one of Canada’s most influential photographers.
The summer-fall exhibition is timed with the launch of a 356-page book, Greg Girard: Photographs 1972–2026, co-published by The Magenta Foundation.
“I’ve never had a dedicated show like this, the first one for me,” Girard told the Now-Leader. “I’ve been doing it for awhile so it’s nice to finally get some summing up, as it were. It all happened pretty quickly, just over a year to put together a pretty big show.”
Since the early 1970s Girard has examined the social and physical transformations of cities in Asia and North America. Over the years, working as a freelance journalist and other jobs, he has lived on both sides of the Pacific.
As a teen in Burnaby he began making his way to the heart of Vancouver, camera in hand.
“On the weekends, in the last year in high school, sometimes I’d stay in a cheap hotel and photograph people and that part of the city,” Girard recalled. “It was another world down at Main and Hastings. It wasn’t as desperate, maybe a fair word, as now.… You know, every shop front was occupied by a functioning business — pool halls, cafes, clothing stores, butchers, hat shops.”
After graduating, Girard travelled the West Coast and beyond, from Thailand to Japan, where he began to develop his acclaimed style of photography. Globally, he made a name for himself with images of urban settings at night, long exposures, empty streets and neon lights.
“He is masterful at photographing people and portraying a city through its inhabitants,” raves Elliott Ramsey, who co-curated the Polygon exhibition with Reid Shier, gallery director.
“In this exhibition, visitors will be able to not only experience the honing of his vision, but also get a sense of how he moved through the world.”
Girard now lives in the Fleetwood area and spends time photographing the people and streets of Surrey.
“I enjoy things that are a little bit off the beaten track, so to speak, not in the spotlight, so actually Surrey is great for that,” he said. “It’s where I live and anywhere I live, I make pictures. So I photograph the Surrey that I’m living in.
“I don’t really know it so it’s a chance to kind of explore this new place,” Girard adds. “It’s been interesting with a lot of the new infrastructure going up, the extended Canada (SkyTrain) line, which reminds me of living in China in the ’90s and 2000s when all this new infrastructure was being built everywhere and every city of size was a kind of a construction site. Surrey kind of reminds me of my days living and travelling in China at that time, the construction development, the kind of raw concrete things in the middle of the road going up.”
Look for Girard’s latest photos on his Instagram account (gregforaday), which has 251,000 followers, or visit greggirard.com.
His exhibit at The Polygon Gallery closes Oct. 25 at 101 Carrie Cates Court, North Vancouver. Admission is by donation, courtesy of BMO Financial Group.
“Working on this project has been an eye-opening experience,” the photographer says. “Knowing that you’ve had a 50-plus year career is one thing. Trying to make sense of it, and in particular dealing with such an immense physical archive of film, is another. Revisiting all the places I’ve traveled, lived, and explored through the exhibition and the publication has been exciting and a bit overwhelming, in a good way.”