Greg Girard: Tokyo–Yokosuka 1976–1983

Opening Reception and Book Launch: May 4th 6-9pm
Exhibition Dates: May 4-31 2019
Location: 1151 Queen St E

Patel Gallery is pleased to present as part of the CONTACT Photography festival Greg Girard's solo exhibition and Toronto Book Launch of, Tokyo–Yokosuka 1976–1983 with the Magenta Foundation.

Greg Girard’s photographs from Tokyo -Yokosuka 1976–-1983 are artifacts of a pre-bubble Tokyo, before it acquired imaginative shape as the late 20th century’s default for a 21st century city. Girard’s Tokyo mixes post-war scruffiness with a transitional modernity, capturing moments before the city (and Japan) exploded slow-motion into our late 20th century consciousness. While living in Tokyo, Girard started photographing in Yokosuka, just southwest of Tokyo, home to a sprawling US Navy base, and the many bars and clubs clustered nearby. As Japan, and Tokyo in particular, was about to launch itself into Tomorrowland, the base and its host community (and others like it in the region), a vestige of Japan’s defeat in WW II, were about to tip into Yesterday.

This body of work provides a glimpse of the moment when two historical streams passed each other headed in opposite directions: one, the decline of US pre-eminence in the post-war world, particularly in Asia; the other, the emergence of an Asian city, the non-West, as the default for what the future might look like.

Greg Girard is a Canadian photographer whose work has examined the social and physical transformation in Asia’s largest cities for more than three decades. Girard's work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, The Art Gallery of Canada and the Vancouver Art Gallery. His photographs have appeared in Time Magazine, Newsweek, Forbes, Elle and The New York Times and he has exhibited in galleries across Asia and North America.

For inquiries please email devan@patel.gallery