'One might compare [Greg Girard's photographs] to ... images of Pripyat and Chernobyl, except that what Girard reveals is so much more possibly the fate of so many places, hence so much more terrible.' Author William Gibson
From the forward to Phantom Shanghai
An initial flick through photographer Greg Girard's new book, Phantom Shanghai, is similar to perusing an estate agent's catalogue for nail houses (those lone symbols of defiance against property developers that regularly grace the pages of newspapers). Surrounded by rubble, half demolished, forlorn and shattered, the city's early-20th-century mansions and walk-ups cling to their foundations as gleaming skyscrapers creep ever closer.
View the 222-paged hardback gallery again and the 130 colour photographs reveal the hypertension between China's centrally planned modernisation drive and its complex past. Girard's documentary is a stunning exploitation of urban light, both natural and artificial, playing on the remaining shadows of Shanghai's fast disappearing alleyways and streets - those once-vital communal organs that, in their brick and mortar death rattle, create a haunting beauty and abjectness.
'Amputees say even when they have had a leg or arm amputated, they can still feel the limb. Shanghai is like that.
It's new all over. But there's a phantom oldness - its past - which you can sense but cannot see, only glimpse in these few remaining old districts,' says the 51-year-old Canadian, who moved to Shanghai in 1998 after having lived for more than a decade in Hong Kong.
The accomplished documentary photographer, whose first book, City of Darkness, detailed the end of the Kowloon Walled City, has returned to a familiar theme: the wrecking ball's target.