salaoffscript
Caracas
WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 30, 12:30 PM PST
in conversation with
This conversation will focus on Baan’s work on Torre David, a nearly-completed but abandoned 45-story office tower in Caracas, occupied by some 1000 families living in the improvised vertical community. Baan’s photographs illuminate life in this working-class community and investigate the different strategies residents employ in making a life for themselves and their families in a structure without electricity, running water, or on the unfinished upper floors, railings, safety barriers, walls or windows. As with questions he attempted to answer in his own work on the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, another informal vertical community, Girard will try to separate reality from myth.
Cities fall in different ways. For some cities, the collapse happens quickly. For others, it is a drawn-out affair. Generally in both cases, a captive population experiences a sense of helplessness in the face of the forces bearing down. Those with the means and the will may try to leave, but for most, there is no choice but to remain and await the seemingly inevitable with a mix of fear, resignation and hope. How does a city fall? For how long can a city fall? What might different falling cities have in common? In this series photographer Greg Girard will hold conversations with four individuals whose work and lives have been shaped by falling cities and who are well positioned to address these questions.
Girard Girard is a Vancouver-based photographer who spent more than thirty years in Asia. His books City of Darkness and City of Darkness Revisited document Hong Kong’s infamous Kowloon Walled City. After a career photographing for TIME and National Geographic he now produces books and exhibitions. He is represented by Monte Clark Gallery.
Source: salaoffscript
