Greg Girard Accelerated Ruins Greg Girard Ruine Accélérée Amish Morrell

Document generated on 09/30/2021 2:20 p.m. Ciel variable Art, photo, médias, culture Greg Girard Accelerated Ruins Greg Girard Ruine accélérée Amish Morrell Made in China Number 81, Spring 2009 URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/547ac See table of contents Publisher(s) Les Productions Ciel variable ISSN 1711-7682 (print) 1923-8932 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this article Morrell, A. (2009). Greg Girard: Accelerated Ruins / Greg Girard : ruine accélérée. Ciel variable, (81), 14–21. Tous droits réservés © Les Productions Ciel variable, 2009 This document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ Justa sthes e imagescaptur e Shanghai inth etwiligh t ofth e twentieth century,the yar etake n inth edus k ofearl yevening , or just beforedawn . ... Thistempora l stagingevoke sth ethreshol d betweendrea man dawakening . The problem for many theorists, including the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, is that time can be seen only as an indirect image. Empirical descriptions of time do not allow us to see time itself unfold, raising the problem of how to give it visual expression.' The camera freezes movement, which can be made visible only through the juxtaposition of visual ele ments. In the case of film, the sequential display of still images produces an illusion of movement. In Accelerated Ruins photography, time can be made visible through the juxtaposition of "before" and "after" photographs. 2 BY AMISH MORRELL In Girard's photographs, this can be seen within the image itself, not simply through the presence of the Greg Girard's recent monograph Phantom Shanghai occasional blurred figure, but through the juxtaposi describes the urban vestiges of communist-era tion of the old Shanghai in accelerated ruin and the Shanghai as they are swept away in the city's recent new Shanghai in accelerated development. wave of economic development. In his images, dilap Just as these images capture Shanghai in the twi idated nineteenth-century buildings, partitioned into light of the twentieth century, they are taken in the multiple apartments to house workers in the twenti dusk of early evening, or just before dawn. There is eth century, stand alone in the twenty-first century none of the full brightness of the sun to fix the time against an encroaching tide of steel and glass high- of day. This temporal staging evokes the threshold rises. Inside, makeshift mailboxes line a stairwell for between dream and wakening, a metaphor employed addresses that will soon no longer exist. These images by the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin as a capture the ruins of twentieth-century Shanghai, means to understand the emergence of modernity being hastily cleared away to make room for a new in Europe and its effects on consciousness. Benjamin version of modernity. In doing so, they engage a examined marginal figures of the late nineteenth cen familiar challenge of photography: how to represent tury, such as prostitutes, flâneurs, and junk collectors the movement of time. - markers of transition who revealed simultaneously Thames Town, Songjiang District, 2005 GREG GIRARD 15 Greg Girard is aCanadian-bor n photographer Photographe canadien. Greg Girardvi tà Shan based in Shanghai. He has been recording the ghaidepui s ledébu t desannée s 1990o ùi l social and economic changes taking place documente pour des magazines oude spubli across Asia since the early 1990s, mostly for cationsd'entreprise s lestransformation s editorial and corporate clients. His first book sociales etéconomique s de l'Asie. Son premier City of Darkness, documented the final years livre, Cityo f Darkness, documentait lesder of the Kowloon Walled City in HongKong . nières années de lacit éemmuré e deKowloon . Phantom Shanghai, his second book (Magenta à Hong Kong.So ndernie r livre, Phantom Books,Toronto : 2007), is in its third edition. Shanghai,a ét é publié par Magenta Books en He is represented by Monte Clarke Gallery, in 2007. L'artiste es t représenté par lagaleri e Toronto and Vancouver. Monte Clark,à Toront oe tà Vancouver . the logic of the present and how the past resists an emergent present. 3 The figures mark a transition between two worlds, embodying, out of necessity, conflicting value systems, each making the other visi Girard's images depict neither the spectacular hope ble. There is a long precedent for photography that fulness of SUPEH's model Shanghai nor the packaged describes such a threshold of consciousness; Eugène nostalgia of Xiantiandi, in which both future and past Atget had photographed the empty streets of Paris a The fantasy (and, increasingly, the reality) of are simulations designed to encourage economic century earlier. As in Ateget's photographs, Girard's twenty-first-century Shanghai is one of global investment. In his depiction of the astonishingly have few, if any, people, and his images also have the finance and high-priced real estate. With massive rapid disappearance of twentieth-century Shanghai ethereal light of the early morning. In his 1931 essay improvements in transportation infrastructure and and its replacement with twenty-first-century Shang A Small History of Photography, Benjamin describes housing, Shanghai is poised to become one of the hai, a transition is witnessed in one moment. Viewers Atget's photographs of handcarts lined up in the gar world's most important trading hubs and economic encounter the ruins that lie between these worlds dens, a long row of boot lasts, and building façades engines, shifting from a predominantly industrial and the traces of their final inhabitants. In doing so, - images without human presence. Of these images, economy to one based increasingly on the provision they may ask what will become of those who live Benjamin writes, "...the city in these pictures looks of information and services. This future is given imag there, and how we will remember the world that they cleared out, like a lodging that has not yet found a inary form, in three dimensions, at the Shanghai leave behind. new tenant. It is in these achievements that surrealist Urban Planning Exhibition Hall, which houses a scale photography sets the scene for a salutary estrange model of Shanghai as it will appear, radically modern 1 D.N . Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze'sTim eMachin e(Durha man d Lon ment between man [sic] and his surroundings." 4 5 don:Duk eUniversit y Press, 1997), p. 81. 2 Thisi sparticularl y ized, in 2020. This idealized model of the future visible inE dBurtynsky' s photographso f Feng Jie , a citydestroye d Benjamin describes Atget's photographs as being exists in stark comparison to the conditions in which andabandone dfo rconstructio no fth eThre eRiver s Dam , i nwhic h heshow s a n entir ecityscap eraze dthroug hth ejuxtapositio no f without aura (for him, this is part of what makes workers lived duringthe second half of the twentieth photographstake ntw o monthsapart .Blak eFitzpatrick ,"Disaste r them surrealist). He writes, "They pump the aura out century. It begs the question, what will become of the Topographies,"i nRober tBea n fed.) . Imag e an d Inscription: A n of reality like a sinking ship." They can be de-familiar narrow lane-way townhouses, shikumen archways, Anthologyo f Contemporar yCanadia nPhotograph y(Toronto : YYZ Press, 2006), pp. 54-55. 3 ForBenjamin , the prostitutetake s ized, taken from the unique place and time that they and courtyard gardens of twentieth-century Shang thelogi co fth emarke tt oth eextrem eb yemployin ghe rbod ya s inhabit. Girard's images, on the other hand, are filled hai, and how will these places be remembered? commodity;th e flâneur recognizesan dindulge sth epul lo fcom with aura; they are uniquely of a moment that passes modities, whiteresistin gth edemand so f work ; an dth ejun k col While Girard's images present one particular form lector resistsbot h us e valu ean dexchang evalu ei nhi saccumula as quickly as it has been grasped. of remembrance, a new urban development project, tiono f objects . Rajee vPatke , "Benjamin'sArcade sProjec t andth e At the time these images were made, the places Postcolonial City,"i nRya nBisho p et al. (eds.), Postcolonial Urban- Xiantiandi, in the city's centre, provides a simulation ism:Southeas t Asia n Cities an dGloba l Processes(Ne wYor kan d Lon that they depict, unlike many other ruins, were still of the old Shanghai, within the economic parameters don:Routledge , 2003), p. 299. 4 Walter Benjamin, " ASmal l His inhabited. One image is titled to indicate that an toryo fPhotography, " in On e Way Stree t (London : Ne wLef tBooks , of the new Shanghai. To create a pedestrian-only 1931), p. 251. 5 This is th elarges t scalemode lo fit skin di nth e apartment building has been condemned for demoli shopping and entertainment district, the city evicted world,takin gu p a n entir efloo ro fth eSUPEH' sseven-storey , tion; the door is open and someone is at the security twenty-thousand-square-metre building. Visitor sar eoffere d its former tenants, tore down decaying colonial-era desk. In another image, a bicycle stands in an alley, binocularsan d ca n walk o n suspende dramp stha t allowthe mt o buildings, and,wit h the investment of foreign capital, lookdow nupo nth emode l city .

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