From Downtown Eastside hotel rooms to global stages: Greg Girard's 50-year photographic journey

In 1972, decades before Instagram, 16-year-old Greg Girard checked himself into a Downtown Eastside hotel with little more than rolls of film and a hunger to discover the city he didn't yet know.

What followed was decades of arresting images: neon on night, streetscapes and skylines, old against new. "I discovered downtown Vancouver through my camera," Girard recalled. "It was cheap hotels, cheap restaurants and cafes, but it was a whole functioning blue collar down-at-heel world… It was dense with interesting stuff once you start paying attention to it."

Now, at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, that teenager's fascination has blossomed into an extended retrospective. The exhibition presents more than 160 photographs shot between 1972 and 2026—many of them never published before—tracing Girard's evolution from a young documentarian of Vancouver's streets to an internationally acclaimed photographer whose work has circled the globe.

"It's terribly gratifying," Girard said of the show. "When you begin, you have no idea if anybody's ever going to see anything." He called Polygon "one of the key lens-based photographic museums in Canada."

For decades, Girard lived in Asia, working as a photojournalist covering natural disasters, civil war, coups, and royal visits—assignments that paid the bills but taught him a different discipline than shooting for his own interest. Hong Kong became a particular obsession. "Hong Kong is an incredibly stimulating, modern city with interesting scruffiness at its immediate edges," he said. "I was trying to photograph it as best I could. And that just meant walking around a lot day and night. I sort of felt like I had everything to myself, which was great."

Eventually, Girard returned to Vancouver in 2012 to find a much-changed city. The industrial port where he'd shot blue-collar workers and landscapes had become cordoned off by security fencing. He sought new vantage points on the North Shore, adapting to a transformed landscape.

What he didn't anticipate was finding an audience that his 16-year-old self would have found inconceivable: almost 250,000 followers on Instagram, where he shares his work. It's the vintage material from the 1970s and '80s that draws the most engagement. "I think there's a lot of attention to the way things used to be in the pictures," Girard observed. "I think nostalgia, of course, plays a role but also there's a sense of discovery."

The Polygon retrospective coincides with the release of Girard's latest book, Photographs 1972-2026, a compendium capturing the scope of his career. Elliott Ramsey, who co-curated the exhibition with gallery director Reid Shier, noted that Girard's reputation for photographing cities in transition often overshadows another strength. "When people think of Greg Girard, they often call to mind images of urban settings at night, long exposures, empty streets, and neon lights," Ramsey said. "His reputation for photographing cities in transition is so established that what often gets left out of the conversation is how excellent he is as a portraitist."

If Girard hopes audiences will take away one thing from his show, it's that virtually anyone can follow the same creative pursuit. The message feels especially urgent to him now. "These days, images can be generated by sitting in front of a screen in a room by yourself about anything," he said. "I think that would be abandoning something that matters."