Apr 08, 2014 Greg Girard on Revisiting Kowloon Walled City
Sometime around 2000, I met Greg Girard the old-fashioned way: I sent a letter to the publisher of City of Darkness, a brick of a photo book about Kowloon Walled City that Greg made with his friend Ian Lambot. Through a series of letters, faxes, and phone calls, I eventually interviewed the then-Shanghai resident about the authoritative and gorgeous publication for Giant Robot magazine. Since then we’ve continued to correspond and even had coffee when our cities happened to align.
So I was excited to hear from Greg that he and Ian were remixing the book with new photos, interviews, and information about Hong Kong’s infamously unplanned, unregulated, and unpoliced maze of slummy apartments and small businesses that ranged from unlicensed doctors and dentists to horror-show butcher shops to the requisite dope dealers, gambling dens, and whorehouses. The ramshackle collection of structures was torn down in 1993, the same year as the book’s first edition, but the sprawling, dense, and anarchic city block seems to be more popular now than it ever was when it actually stood. And so their volume is being reborn and revised, funded by Kickstarter. Receiving coverage from CNN to Vice, the project has already reached its funding goal but it’s not too late to support it and secure your own signed copy or print from the sure-to-be-jaw-dropping book.
What prompted you and Ian to revisit the City of Darkness book? A sense of unfinished business? Nostalgia? Public interest?
The book had remained in print since it was first published in 1993 and, over the years, Ian and I were aware of the unexpected ways in which the Kowloon Walled City was turning up as an obvious inspiration in popular culture and also being referenced in architecture, urban theory, and other areas. A couple of years ago, with the 20th anniversary of the demolition approaching, we decided that rather than do another reprint we would try to update the book to reflect the life that the Walled City had taken on so many years after its demolition. At the same time, it was an opportunity to revisit the content, add pictures that had been overlooked, and play with the layout–hopefully improving things in the process. It gave us the opportunity to conduct more interviews, which Ian spent a lot of time on in the past year or so, as well as source some fascinating documents that reveal a lot about the role of the police and their policies towards the Walled City. It turns out they were far more aware and involved than the myths would have it. There is a lot of new material. The new one will be about 50 percent larger than the original.
Were you familiar with the tributes and references to Kowloon Walled City in Batman, Call of Duty, or even the Bay Area metal band?
I can’t remember how I first heard about Christopher Nolan incorporating his version of the Walled City in Batman Begins, but it was certainly high on our list when we started researching the many places where it has left its mark.
Where do the new photos come from? Favorite pieces that didn’t have space in the old design? Unprocessed rolls of film?
The new photos are from our own archives that got edited out in 1993, but looking at them today we wonder what we were thinking back then. There are also a good numb er of historical photos, and we are also licensing pictures from other sources such as HK film production companies that shot feature dramas there. Long Arm of the Law, by Johnny Mak, is a favourite. There’s a final shoot-out scene in the Walled City between the HK police and a gang from the PRC, former PLA soldiers, who have been robbing jewelry shops in HK. Which actually happened in HK when I was living there in the 1980s. The Big Circle Gang from the mainland carried out these robberies in Tsim Sha Tsui, one of the city’s main shopping and tourist districts, using AK-47s and hand grenades.
When was the last time you spent time looking at the images that you and Ian shot. How has the passage of time affected your impressions of them?
I probably didn’t revisit the Walled City pictures until 2012, more than 20 years after they were taken, when Ian and I started talking about doing an update. You probably know how it goes, looking at tim that has already been edited, with all the good ones already taken out. So many bad pictures, and then you come across a gem. Tastes change. One’s idea of what a picture can be changes. So, it has been a kind of a luxury to be able to go back and do this.
And there are new interviews and research, of course. How did you settle on the topics? Tell me about the challenges of conducting research 20 years later?
The added interviews are all new ones conducted over the past couple of years. Tracking down former residents was tough. Dispersed all over HK. Some of course had died after 20 years. We knew there would be much of interest if we could get into the police archives, but that didn’t really happen. Instead we were able to interview some former police who had great stories about patrolling there in the ’60s and ’70s. In those days, the place really did host the vice for which it got its reputation. By the time we started photographing in the ’80s, the vice there wasn’t any different really from what you would find in any working-class HK neighborhood. One document we were able to obtain is a very thorough government survey from that period which lists the exact number of brothels, opium dens, strip clubs, pornography theaters, dog meat restaurants, etc. You can’t help but wish to have been born a little earlier.
My impression is that you finished the book before launching the crowd-sourcing effort. What led you to that strategy for getting the book published?
That’s pretty much correct. We just went ahead and started working on the update, spending our own money as we always seem to do. But at the point of actually going to print there was no way we could afford to do that. The bill is just to big for a book of this scope. We had both vaguely heard about Kickstarter and other crowd-sourcing platforms. Here in Vancouver the folks from Kickstarter gave a presentation last summer, when they launched in Canada, and I went along to that with a pen and a notebook.
Any other other projects that I should know about or is this book taking up your entire life right now?
Oh most definitely this takes up your entire life once you take the plunge. I wasn’t really much of a social media kind of guy before this started and so I’ve been floored by the response. And I’m still very much a beginner in all this. As for other projects, from 2008-2010 I spent a good part of my time working on a project in Japan, Korea, Guam and other places in Asia where there are, or have been U.S. military bases, photographing on the bases and in the host communities. I tend to see things in terms of books, and this one isn’t finished yet.
Check out the video (above) and then visit the City of Darkness Revisited Kickstarter page for more information about Ian and Greg’s very cool project and how to support it.