The Book – Jacket Text
In 1946 the photographer Hedda Morrison, acclaimed for her 1930s and 1940s images of China, arrived in Hong Kong. In six months there she photographed virtually every aspect of local life, which was little changed from decades earlier. However, it was destined soon to be transformed.
 
This book presents Morrison’s compelling, intimate documentary images of Hong Kong, its people and patterns of life, with narrative essays by the author Edward Stokes that vividly describe the postwar years. These unrivalled photographs, superbly printed at Harvard University from Hedda Morrison’s original negatives, hold up a mirror to a vanished world.
 
For six months, cameras in hand, Hedda Morrison roamed Hong Kong’s streets and districts, coasts and countryside. This book records the people and places she encountered. Hong Kong was then on the brink of profound change. Within just a few years, much of what Hedda Morrison photographed would be swept aside. Yet in 1946
– 47 Hong Kong’s urban and rural life still retained its old feel, its traditions and cultural ways: colonial precincts, densely packed Chinese streets, bustling markets, hawkers and artisans, nomadic fisherfolk, rice farmers.
 
The human sympathy and striking compositions of Hedda Morrison’s photographs
reflect the eye of a masterful, artistic photographer. Yet fewer than thirty of this book’s reproductions have ever been seen before. It was those images, first sighted in a slender 1946 government report that prompted Edward Stokes, in 1995, to begin searching for the original negatives. These, later, were discovered at the Harvard-Yenching Library of Harvard University.
 
This is a unique record of a vanished Hong Kong: the most complete pictorial account
of how the colony looked in the decades from the early 1930s to the 1950s. Hedda Morrison’s photographs will appeal to those who appreciate fine documentary images, East Asian history and culture, postwar colonial history, and the ethnography of now vanished crafts, trades and rural life.   

The Book – Background
The Hongkong Conservation Photography Foundation, in partnership with Harvard University, published this landmark book in September 2005. The book shows the
Hong Kong of the postwar years through the photographs of Hedda Morrison and the words of Edward Stokes. The book's gestation stretches back over ten years.
   
In 1995 when researching his first Hong Kong book, Edward Stokes saw the 1946 Government Report. In it were some 20 photographs credited to Hedda Morrison, whose name he knew from her China books. Thus began his search for the original photographs. This, over some years took him through archives in Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Finally he located Alastair Morrison, the husband of Hedda, today aged 90. When they met in 1995, Alastair Morrison told Edward Stokes that his wife's life's work had been bequested to Harvard University. So began Stokes' search there. There was no catalogue record of any Hong Kong photos, but Stokes held on to his photographer's gut-level instinct that Morrison never would have lost any images. Finally, in 1998 a hundred prints were found at Harvard Library; then, in 1999, some 1,000 negatives – all in perfect condition. They are memorable images, offering telling insights.  The range of subjects is wide, covering almost every aspect of life in Hong Kong then: Central, Kowloon, the harbour, Hong Kong Island, the Chinese districts, the islands, fishing life, the New Territories and rural life. The photographs reflect Morrison's sensitivity to ordinary people, and her fine sense of composition.

The book is 11" x 10", 300pp, with 220 photographs, on semi-matt art paper, linen jacket. The text is about 50,000 words in ten chapters, with many pages of Extended Captions. A fine print maker made the reproduction prints at Harvard, from Hedda Morrison’s original negatives.

Purchase the book online through HONG KONG UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Download sample pages from the book in PDF format.

Photographs by Hedda Morrison © President and Fellows of Harvard College