IT’S 1975 AT GRANVILLE and Broadway, and the late, great Aristocratic Restaurant stands as a beacon in the night. Rising Vancouver photographer Greg Girard has set up his tripod on the sidewalk and captures a blurred figure entering the glass door to the diner, where a waitress busies herself behind an illuminated cigarette machine. Around its corner a pink-neon “DINING ROOM” sign beckons over a window that reveals lone customers eating under bright fluorescent lights.
In the vast and remarkable 50-year survey Greg Girard: Photographs 1972–2026, just opened at The Polygon Gallery, nighttime scenes and their hidden worlds become a recurring theme—both here and across the Pacific. In the landmark show curated by Reid Shier and Elliott Ramsey, we also meet the people who inhabit those worlds, the bartenders and barflies, shopkeepers and migrant workers, military wives and Greyhound passengers. They’re just some of the ones he has encountered in these corners of some of the world’s largest metropolises.