Greg Girard photographed Hong Kong at night between 1974 and 1989. The Canadian photographer’s pictures show us a city full of promise alive after dark, much as Gerry Cranham did with his night shots. He returned to the city many times after his first visit as a teenager in 1974. “Hong Kong is really stimulating,” he recalled in 2015. “It was the first foreign place I went to. I travelled by ship from San Francisco. Even in those days it was hard to get passage on a freighter, they’d stopped carrying passengers, but I really wanted to travel by ship, so I found a Philippine freighter company that still took passengers, they had about six cabins. I sailed from San Francisco to Hong Kong.” After 18 days at sea, he arrived. “Seeing the Hong Kong skyline for the first time is exciting, just as it is today – that much density, that much height on a skyline. Today it’s magnified by ten times, but it still registered that way back then.”     “I started taking photographs at night as soon as I picked up my first camera,” he says. “I never really thought of them as ‘night’ pictures. It was just a different kind of light, whether neon, fluorescent, moonlight or the light of the city reflected off an overcast sky. “But Hong Kong was alive at night in a way that other places weren’t. Alive indeed, when darkness falls another world comes out to play and these photographs capture just that.”       “I went to Asia in 1974, and that was the first trip outside of North America, and it was a big photographic adventure, as well as a personal one. I think it was all part of trying to get deeper into the place you’re at, in a way that shows what’s there.” – Greg Girard   Via: HK:PM at the Blue Lotus Gallery in Hong Kong. The post Hong Kong Nights 1974-1989 appeared first on Flashbak.