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Story of
the Project – by Edward Stokes
In early 1995, while casually browsing
in the Special Collections of The University
of Hong Kong Libraries, I happened to
take down the Annual Report on Hong
Kong for the Year 1946
– a government publication. Turning
the pages, one, and then another –
in all twenty-seven – photographs
appeared. Each one offered telling evidence
of Hong Kong as it was in 1946: people
rebuilding their lives, the scenes and
moods so distant from modern Hong Kong.
Each image bore the credit ‘Photograph
by Hedda Morrison’.
It was moment of exciting discovery.
I knew Hedda Morrison’s name from
her
China books, and knew also that she
had died four years earlier, in 1991.
One could only guess at the possibilities.
Yet the historical potential intrigued
and tempted me. Might there be more
photographs by Morrison that portrayed
the
Hong Kong of 1946? And might her negatives
still exist? The answers to those
first flashing questions lay some years
into the future. Further instances of
happenstance were to guide me, haltingly
at first, gradually more steadily, to
the images now seen on this website.
My photographer’s instinctive
feeling – that a professional
of Morrison’s calibre would never
loose any negatives unless some tragedy
struck – started my enquiries.
Over time my growing admiration for
Hedda Morrison, as photographer to photographer,
urged me to sustain the search. Moreover,
I knew how easily photographs can become
‘buried’ in collections
through the numbers of images
in those collections; the costs and
difficulties of cataloguing them; and
the extremely small physical space that
hundreds – even thousands –
of negatives actually occupy.
In Hong Kong casual investigations threw
up curious coincidences. I discovered
that, since 1985, Hedda Morrison had
been in intermittent correspondence
with
a Hong Kong historian, Elizabeth Sinn
– who knew that Morrison was seeking
to publish a book of her Hong Kong photographs.
Later I learnt that, in early 1988,
Hedda had written to Elizabeth: ‘The
1946 photos of mine have gone to (Oxford
University Press). Now we must just
see what will happen to them. In any
case
I enjoyed printing them; most of them
I had never printed before.’ Yet,
aware that colour books dominated contemporary
publishing, Hedda Morrison had only
faint hopes for the book publication
of her historic images of postwar Hong
Kong. |
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