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In
her spare time Hedda Hammer explored
parts of northern China, making
various expeditions through the
mid-1930s; and,
despite the difficulties resulting
from the Japanese invasion of
China, into the early 1940s. She
delighted in photographing new
and different places.
Her rugged, reliable twin-lens
Rolleiflex and Rolleicord cameras
– her lifetime favourites
– always went with her.
‘She was never happier than
when peering into the ground-glass
viewfinder of her Rollei’,
Alastair Morrison recalls. ‘She
was very quick in the use of her
cameras and had a wonderful sense
of timing.’ Hammer had no
interest in peripheral photographic
equipment. Indeed, besides her
Rolleis, some contrast enhancing
filters and a tripod, she possessed
virtually no other gear.
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The
bird fancier, Peking.
By Hedda Morrison, from
A photographer on Old
Peking.
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Yet she went to extraordinary pains
to capture her images, always putting
her shooting above personal comfort.
She later recorded how ‘for anyone
who was reasonably adaptable travelling
in China in the 1930s presented no problems’.
Yet in reality her generally solo journeys
would have daunted most others. ‘Arrived
at a railway station you walked, or
hired donkeys or a rickshaw’,
she later recalled. On visits to Jehol,
in 1934 and 1935, she set off ‘on
the back of a truck loaded with bags
of flour’. Along the Shantung
(Shandong) coast she voyaged in junks,
sleeping on deck amidst the reek of
drying fish. And, perhaps most remarkably,
in 1936 she journeyed for some weeks
in the Western Hills, an extremely poor
area about 160 kilometres west of Peking
– alone but for three accompanying
donkey men.
In spontaneously and openly recording
people, her gender and size almost
certainly helped by assisting any
documentary photographer’s need:
the ability to blend into the background,
to be unobtrusive and non-threatening.
Her physical impediment may also have
led to a sympathetic rapport. In this
Hammer was like the American documentary
photographer Dorothea Lange, who came
to prominence during the Depression
years. She also was small, had suffered
from polio and had a limp. Both women
were drawn to the lives of people
little known, to places seldom visited,
and to experiences or customs mostly
ignored. However, both, eschewed images
that portrayed the extremes of poverty,
the bizarre or horrific.
Hedda Hammer’s China journeys
today provide a telling record of
numerous northern parts of the country
when, despite political upheaval,
old ways of life remained intact:
monks in hillside monasteries; craftsmen
and artisans; mothers and children;
peasants tilling the soil; street
hawkers and itinerant acrobats. Hammer’s
journeys took her across a wide swathe
of north China: Yun Kang (1933); Cheng
Ting (1934); Jehol (1934 and 1935);
Hua Shan (1935); the Western Hills
(1936); the Shantung coast (1937);
Pao Ting (1940); Ch’u Fu and
T’ai Shan (1942); and Nanking
(1944). The best of her photographs
from these journeys were published
in the book named below, in 1987.
Hedda Morrison was then aged seventy-nine.
Travels of a Photographer
in China.
For book details see References.
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