Kowloon Walled City

This photograph was taken by Greg Girard, a canadian photographer who visited Hong Kong since 1974, and many other countries in Asia. The Kowloon Walled City was a ruined urban settlement in Hong Kong, extreme densely populated, where lived working class people affected by the live conditions in this place. Many of their buildings were evicted or uninhabitabled, until its demolition in 1993.

The photograph shows a town which architecture is practically disappearing in the whole world, because of the proliferation of new buildings, as a part of the gentrification that is changing radically the urban landscape, even here in Santiago. In the Girard's photograph we can see the weight of the time over windows, walls and apartments. Also, we appreciate the singular intervention made by the neighbors.

The image was captured by Girard before to the Kowloon's demolition, in the same year of 1993, as a part of the graphic book "City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City", which he published with his friend and coworker Ian Lambot.

I like this photograph, because it remembers me the Yasujiro Ozu's cinema. In the Ozu movies, there's an idea of modernity against the japanese cultural traditions (family, marriage, sexism, etc.). For example, in An autumn afternoon (1962), there are frames very similar to this photograph. Ozu shows fronts of buildings with clothes hanged up, the wind blowing between the curtains, and mainly, the lethargy and calm of the inanimate objects.