At Monte Clark Gallery until February 1 (gallery closed December 22 to January 13)

Although photographer Greg Girard was born and raised in Vancouver, he evolved his vision and refined his style in Asia. He also made his reputation there. Girard’s CV suggests he is drawn to port cities such as Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, where he has lived, worked, and created a compelling body of work over a period of 30 years. Another of his great interests is cities in transition, where old, human-scale shops and dwellings are rapidly giving way to soaring glass towers and sky-high real-estate prices. Many of his photos have been taken on assignment for magazines such as National Geographic, Time, Paris-Match, and Stern. The most striking images, however, are those shot for his own book projects, such as his highly acclaimed Phantom Shanghai, City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City, and Hanoi Calling: One Thousand Years Now.

Girard moved back to Vancouver a couple of years ago and—as demonstrated in his current show, A Better Tomorrow—ours is the transitioning port city that now commands his interest. Untitled (Grain Terminal #1), his large colour print of North Vancouver’s Richardson Grain Terminal, is eerily powerful. Against a lavender sky, the massive silos and elevators glow as if radioactive. They possess a mood of surreality, like a steampunk nightmare. Like a mid-20th-century conception of an atomic-powered space station that awaits its launch on the shores of Burrard Inlet. In Bridge and Grain Terminal, the luridly lit, manmade environment is viewed through a screen of dark, bare winter branches, creating a ghostly interface between nature and culture.

Previous shows at the Monte Clark Gallery have included Girard’s dramatic images of Shanghai and Hanoi, distinguished not only by their probing subject matter but also by their high degree of detail, their saturated colour, and their unearthly light (the result, often, of shooting his urban subjects at dusk). Part of what was compelling in each of Girard’s previous exhibitions was the aesthetic and thematic coherence of the work. Because A Better Tomorrow is a kind of grab bag of images, old and new, large and small, black-and-white and colour, and because it covers a wide range of subjects, those unifying qualities are missing here. Over the years, Girard has focused his camera on celebrities (Jackie Chan in high-leaping action, Gong Li in regal repose), sports (if you call drag racing a sport), ’70s rock musicians (long hair, tight jeans, big dicks), and a naked Thai boxer stepping off a weigh scale (surrounded by a hyper-intent crowd of men).

Although the early black-and-white images are less visually and conceptually engaging than Girard’s more recent colour work, they chronicle the development of a self-taught photographer before his true subjects—modernity and urbanism—fully asserted themselves. The lightbox image Tomorrow Square and Neighbourhood Demolition, shot in Shanghai in 2010, is exemplary of the later work. Red-brick rubble and a few low-rise buildings—condemned, we assume, but still occupied—stake out the foreground and middle ground, while futuristic towers loom behind them against another weirdly twilit sky. The effect is breath-taking.

In an online interview with fototazo, Girard says that during the 1990s much of Shanghai “looked like it had been bombed from the air, so widespread was the demolition of central neighbourhoods. It was a unique moment because at the same time the pace of new construction was just staggering.” Part of what’s interesting in this exhibition is that Girard registers both the blasted and destabilizing nature of change without making an overt judgment. His subject, again, is what modernity looks like in parts of Asia (and Canada). It’s up to us, his viewers, to find an accord between his images and our beliefs.