Kowloon Walled City: Finding Truth in the ‘City of Darkness’
Rare photos of a legendary location
By Luke Kelly
In a city that has embraced skyscrapers more than any other, there is one legendary district that, for a time, was the most densely populated place on the planet. Kowloon Walled City grew from a small Qing Dynasty army barracks to become a living fortress of humanity, a hub for criminal activity and prostitution where sunlight was rarely visible. At one point, an estimated 33,000 people lived in over 300 interconnected high-rise buildings, a city within a city, unregulated and unsupervised by the government.
Now demolished, the ‘City of Darkness’ has featured in many novels, movies and games, including the Bourne series of books and the 1993 film Crime Story starring Jackie Chan.
Photographer Greg Girard is a Canadian photographer who has spent much of his life in Asia documenting societal change, and became fascinated by the Walled City after he moved to Hong Kong in 1982. We spoke to him about one of his recent projects, a book entitled City of Darkness, featuring photos from his visits to Kowloon Walled City.
“Living in Hong Kong in the 1980s, it seemed that the Kowloon Walled City was a place everybody had heard of but nobody had ever been,” Girard explained. “Its reputation as a dangerous slum outside of government control for the most part kept people away. I more or less stumbled across it one evening, taking photographs near the airport. I came around a corner and there at the end of the block loomed a building- thing that didn’t seem to belong to the Hong Kong I knew and lived in. I knew instinctively that that had to be the Walled City. ”
Girard recalls that the Walled City felt apart from the rest of the city, and that he faced some resistance when he first entered the crush of buildings and bodies. “In those early days many Walled City residents were hostile to outsiders but over time I managed to make a few pictures and gradually people started to accept me.”
“The ‘streets’ were narrow lanes between buildings, and overhead there were tangled masses of piping and tubing and electrical wires, often dripping with waterlogged refuse. Workshops lined the alleyways: barbecue meat factories, illegal dentists, noodle makers, a rubber plunger factory, a cotton mill, one enterprise after another filled with people working in cramped spaces.”
Although many photographers at the time focused on the crime and poverty that was ever-present in the unregulated sprawl, Girard found that there were more working families than working girls, more honest workers than criminals, and he attempted to photograph the reality of living within its walls.
“My experience, from when I started paying attention to the place in 1986, was that the place was filled with working people and families trying to get by, making a living in extraordinary circumstances,” he recalls. “So, rather than make pictures in “gritty” black and white I decided to shoot in colour, and use lighting where possible to show what the place and people’s lives actually looked like, in a non-romantic, objective way. The place however was so so extreme that it probably tended to overwhelm my attempts at objectivity.”
“If you’re not making work that’s meaningful to you you’re basically wasting your time.”
All of the images were shot on 35mm transparency film, using strobes or umbrella/soft-box lighting for the interiors in which people were working. “These days I make most of my pictures with a Mamiya 7II, and a 80mm lens. I also use the 65mm and the 150mm, and more rarely the 43mm,” Girard told us.
His camera captured the residents of the Walled City in factories, workshops, at home or on rooftops. The project encapsulated the last few years of the Walled City before it was demolished in 1993.
The site where the Walled City once stood has now been converted into a park, which acts as a memorial to the unique place that it once was. A replica of the Walled City has also been created in Tokyo, and has become a tourist destination. The area has also been depicted in numerous movies and video games, but it’s highly unlikely anything will ever truly recreate the ‘City of Darkness.’
Girard has been working as a photographer since the early 1980s, and has worked with National Geographic, TIME and Newsweek. Asked for any advice he’d offer to aspiring photographers, Girard shied away from anything too specific. “I don’t really have any blanket advice [for photographers],” he said, “but at the end of the day if you’re not making work that’s meaningful to you you’re basically wasting your time.”
You can purchase ‘City of Darkness’ here, and see more of Girard’s work on his website.
This article was written by Luke Kelly and was first published on DigitalRev. You can follow us on Facebook or Twitter for more photography stories.
