Interview with Greg Girard
for sabukaru.online
Article about Canadian photographer Greg Girard who documented life in Japan before the Bubble Economy in the late 80s.
The saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" may be an overused cliché, but it breaks down the power of images and their influence on how we perceive our surroundings. People remember best what they see and process visuals 60 000 times faster than text. In fact, we can understand what an image means in 13 milliseconds.
Images tell stories and bring us closer to geographically unreachable places. So, even though most people in western countries haven't been to Japan, they hold a very distinct image of what the country and the people are like – at least it's the picture they have in their head. After journalists, photographers play an essential role in transferring information and creating our individual perception of the world and of foreign countries.
While stories from Japanese society and its [sub]cultures are easily accessible on the net nowadays, a few decades ago, this wasn't the case. Especially before its rise to a financial world power in the 1980s, the Occident did not see Japan as an equally developed country. It paid little interest in the cultural and technological products that were about to hit the markets overseas. Japan’s export offensive shocked the people in the West and fundamentally changed their perception of the country. Nippon became a feared financial player on the global market.
In the early years of the bubble era, a young photographer from Canada landed in Tokyo. His name was Greg Girard, who heard of the island from an Australian traveler he met on an earlier trip in Brunei. He became witness to the beginning of an extravagant phase in Japan's history and brought his impression to the people in the West by capturing Tokyo and its inhabitants with his camera. Through his lens, an occidental audience saw a modern – if not to say futuristic – megapolis that was nothing they ever thought of.
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Full article here
Peter Obradovic, Berlin, 2023