Hedda Morrison’s Hong Kong

A new edition of Hedda Morrison’s photographs of Hong Kong from 1946-47 has been published by Hong Kong University Press. The new edition contains over three quarters of the photographs from the original Hedda Morrison’s Hong Kong published in 2005 and is slightly more affordable. Morrison’s photos are a pretty unique record of a now largely vanished Hong Kong and arguably the most complete pictorial account of how the colony looked during the decades from the early 1930s to the 1950s.

Hedda Morrison was born Hedda Hammer in Stuttgart, in 1908, and studied at the State Institute for Photography in Munich. In 1933 she took up a position at the famous Hartung’s, a German-owned commercial photographic studio in Peking’s Legation Quarter. During her time in Peking she took a lot of photographs of the old city mostly using a Rolleiflex medium-format camera. In 1940 she met Alastair Morrison, the son of the famous Times China bloviator GE Morrison and they married.That’s when Hedda moved to Hong Kong and then on to Sarawak, where Alastair was a government district officer. Hedda died in Canberra in 1991.