Timothy Taylor has written an expansive feature on Greg Girard and what it took to distill 50 years of photographs into a single exhibition at The Polygon Gallery. With photos by Alana Paterson.

“We’re in the boardroom of the Polygon Gallery in Vancouver when it strikes me how complicated a task it is for curators to mount a full career retrospective of photographer Greg Girard, a man who’s been shooting pictures in the cities of the Pacific Rim since his late teenage years in the mid-1970s.

It’s about three months out from the opening, and co-curators Reid Shier and Elliott Ramsey are hunched over their laptops. Girard has Zoomed into the meeting from his home in Surrey, B.C. So, he’s up there nearly life-size on the projected wall screen next to a shared Excel spreadsheet of images, a slightly spectral presence, peering down as 50 years’ worth of photographs scroll past, shots from Vancouver, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Hanoi and other places.

The order of business is print sizes and whether these are to be sourced from existing collections or printed fresh. Straightforward enough. But even having winnowed a master list of 1,500 of Girard’s images down to just 150 that will hang in the show, the curators are still constantly arrested by individual pictures that stop the procedural flow.”

Read the rest on globeandmail.com

View a PDF of the article

Banner photo by Alana Paterson