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Despite
her photographic achievements
Hedda Hammer’s life in Peking
was financially insecure and frugal,
particularly after she left Hartung’s
in 1938. The restrictions imposed
by the outbreak of war made matters
worse; indeed, soon after the
war in Europe had begun Hammer
invested virtually all her life’s
savings in a large shipment of
photographic materials. Later
in the war ‘she lived off
the smell of an oily rag’,
Alastair Morrison states. By then
film, paper and chemicals were
almost impossible to obtain.
Hedda Hammer and Alastair Morrison
first met at Peking, Alastair’s
place of birth, in 1941.
Their interests – in people
and places, in travel and cultures
– gelled, together with
the shared experience of life
away from their homelands.
But the war intervened and Alastair
was posted elsewhere. He returned
in 1946 and they married in Peking,
in July that year. It was to be
a lasting, mutually happy partnership.
Alastair’s |
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Hedda
and Alastair Morrison
on their wedding day in
Peking
5 July 1946.
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| Reproduced
courtesy of Alastair Morrison.
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encouragement helped underpin Hedda’s
commitment to documentary photography,
despite her subsequent limited general
or critical recognition.
Alastair Morrison was the son of the
Peking correspondent of The Times, George
Ernest Morrison. George Ernest, later
known as ‘Morrison of Peking’,
was an
Australian and a medical doctor by training
who had seen adventure and travel in
his early adulthood. After a probing
journey from Burma into southwestern
China, he was appointed as The Times
correspondent in the Chinese capital
in 1897. There, Alastair was born in
1915. The early deaths of both parents
led to a lone boyhood, together with
his brothers, in England – helped
by female relatives and later boarding
school. At Cambridge Alastair gained
a lifelong fascination for travel, different
cultures and ornithology – interests
that later he would share with Hedda.
After her marriage to Alastair, Hedda
never again was entirely dependent
on day-to-day income to sustain her
photography. First in Hong Kong, then
in Sarawak, later across a wide swathe
of Asia, for twenty-five years she
pursued her craft. The legacy, seen
in small part on this website, is
Hedda Morrison’s remarkable
collection of beautiful and now historic
photographs.
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