City of Darkness, Life in Kowloon Walled City*
€350,00
Author: Greg Girard & Ian Lambot (all photographs), Contributors: Charles Goddard, Leung Ping Kwan, Emmy Lung, Peter Popham and Julia Wilkinson Publisher: Watermark Publications Limited Year: 1993 ISBN: 1 873200 13 7 Hardcover in dust jacket, 216 pages, English, first edition. Condition: very good
This publication is the very first edition. Watermark Publications (UK) Ltd published City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City in 1993. The book's co-author, Ian Lambot, founded this publishing house himself after moving to Hong Kong. Although editions also appeared with other publishers such as Wilhelm Ernst & Sohn (primarily for the German/European market), Watermark was the original driving force behind the project. Key facts about the Watermark publication in 1993: Publication date: October 1, 1993. Size: The original edition has 216 pages. This first printing is now a rare and valuable collector's item. The book remained in print with Watermark for almost 20 years before being succeeded in 2014 by the more extensive edition, City of Darkness Revisited.
City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City is an acclaimed book by Greg Girard and Ian Lambot that offers a detailed photographic and textual documentation of the notorious, self-governing enclave in Hong Kong before its demolition in the 1990s. It documents the final years of the Kowloon Walled City, which was once the most densely populated place on Earth, with around 35,000 residents in an area of 2.7 hectares. The book explores its unique architecture, social dynamics, and the daily lives of its residents. The publication features hundreds of photographs, detailed drawings, and extensive interviews with residents (including dentists, factory workers, and teachers), providing personal insights into life in the city.
“Photographers Greg Girard and Ian Lambot spent four years exploring the City, interviewing many of its inhabitants and photographing them at work or in their homes”, and some 320 of these photographs are included, “to create an extraordinary portrait of a unique community, now vanished forever. It was only after it was announced that Kowloon Walled City was to be cleared and demolished that, in late 1987, I first visited the City, initially only to photograph it before it disappeared forever. As a trained architect my initial focus was to capture images of the City as a unique architectural curiosity, but as I began to explore the City’s interiors, it became clear that the real story was the extraordinary community it contained. By chance, a mutual friend introduced me to the Canadian freelance photographer Greg Girard, who had also been drawn to the City and had begun to photograph the City’s residents. The book quickly became a reality." (publisher) "The final ingredient was how best to tell the residents’ stories. My feeling was that the resident’s should explain their stories in their own words and an intrepid local history graduate, Emmy Lung, joined the team and over the next three years we interviewed and photographed over 30 people who lived and/or worked there. And in 1993, City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City was published – a simple photographic record of the place and some of those who lived or worked there, but with little in the way of explanation or historical context." (publisher)
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