Hedda Morrison

Hedwig Marie "Hedda" Morrison (Hammer; 13 December 1908 – 3 December 1991) was a German photographer who created historically significant documentary images of Beijing, Hong Kong and Sarawak from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Born Hedda Hammer in Stuttgart, 13 December 1908 the only sibling of a younger brother Siegfried in a well-to-do middle class family whose father worked for a publishing company.

A polio epidemic in 1911–12 affected her stature and gait and a major operation to correct its effects, brought other health problems that were to affect her for life.

At age 11 she was given a Box Brownie camera which inspired her resolve to become a photographer.

After her secondary education at Königin Katherina Stift Gymnasium für Mädchen, Stuttgart, she commenced study in medicine at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, but prevailed on her parents to enrol her (1929–31) at the State Institute for Photography (Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Lichtbildwesen) in Munich, Bavaria's oldest photography school, completing the certificate course and winning third prize in a student competition in 1931.

While still a student her uncredited photographs were published in Walter de Sager's Making Pottery, which anticipate her interest in, and documentation of, handcraft construction in S. E. Asia.

Hammer was apprenticed during the Great Depression in the commercial studios of the technically exacting Adolf Lazi at Stuttgart 1931–2, though he could not employ her due to the economic strife, so she sought further experience at the Olga Linckelmann Photographische Werkstätte, Hamburg in 1932.

Though she was trained in the aesthetics of the New Objectivity of the period which promoted a formalist approach, her inclination was toward documentary ethnography; recording traditional German Volk costume in the setting of their rural environment in forty-four photographic negatives she preserved and catalogued "Trachtenfest, Stuttgart 1931".

Her aesthetic, practiced throughout her career is a blending of these disciplines, the pictorial, the designed and the document.

Not finding the political or economic situation in Germany to her liking, and encouraged by a horoscope advising she should undertake a long voyage, in 1933 Hammer took up a position in China to manage Hartung's Photo Shop, a German-owned commercial photographic studio at 3 Legation Street, in the old diplomatic quarter of the city then known as Beiping.

She was in charge of seventeen local photographers and soon learned to speak passable Mandarin Chinese and a smattering of Cantonese, and in her spare time she made solo expeditions into parts of northern China.

Her photographs of architecture and Chinese daily life made between 1933 and 1946, featured in a series of books, beginning with Alfred Hoffman's Nanking (1945) and her own Hua Shan (1974).

They preserve the appearance of Peking before the depredations and destruction that began with the destruction of the city walls under Maoist rule.

With Bieber and writer Beatrice Kates, she assembled her 1937–8 documentations of household furniture for a project published in 1948.

In August 1938, due the Japanese occupation of the city, Hartung's was unable to continue employing her.

As a German (the country was an ally of Japan), and unlike other Europeans who were deported, Morrison enjoyed relative freedom and worked from home in Nanchang Street as a freelancer selling albums and single prints of views and of handicrafts to prosperous visiting tourists.

Though the living was precarious, through fellow expatriates, she found work 1938–40 sourcing artefacts for a wealthy British dealer in Chinese arts and crafts, Caroline Frances Bieber in Beiheyan, who collected for the Brooklyn Museum in New York, and thus Morrison was able to continue her excursions through the country into the 1940s.

Of her solo travels Morrison remarked that; "Chinese attitudes towards a solitary woman traveller could not have been more correct or helpful, and I met with courtesy wherever I went."

In 1941, Hammer met Alastair Morrison in Peking, where he had been born, son of the London Times correspondent in Peking, Australian George Ernest Morrison who reported on the Boxer Rebellion.

While he was away in service she lived during the Pacific War in the house of a French diplomat.

She married Morrison in 1946 and they left the unrest in China shortly afterwards, first for Hong Kong for six months and then for Sarawak, where Alastair became a government district officer during its turbulent cession to British Crown Colony (1946–61).

Until she adopted colour in the 1950s, she made exclusively black and white photographs with her medium-format Rolleiflex and Rolleicord, with standard lenses, and carrying as extra equipment only a tripod and set of lens filters.

She rarely used flash or added lighting, and then only using flash powder.

She printed her own work and in Hong Kong she sold postcards of her views of city, mass-printed in her darkroom.

In Sarawak, where the couple were without mains electricity, she had to power her enlarger lamp from car batteries, and she had improvise ways to protect her negatives from mould in the tropical humidity.

Michael Tomlinson reviewing in The Age Morrison's A Photographer in Old Peking notes its 'elegant architectural studies of temples and monasteries which have since been damaged or destroyed' and 'her great talent...for human interest studies...[from] a vanished world, alien and unfamiliar.

And yet the faces peering out at us from the Peking market in the '30s are...human and appealing...'

Claire Roberts considers that "through her photographs of architecture, streetscapes, craftsmen, street vendors and customs, Morrison creates her own image of China. By focusing on labour-intensive traditional crafts and skills, old buildings, religious sites and ancient rites and practices she chooses to record the life and look of 'Old Peking'. In much the same way that she chose to photograph the German folk festival, in China Morrison chose to focus on 'traditional' Chinese life and values rather than those of a 'modem', changing world. She was motivated to record aspects of a foreign culture that she felt was threatened by development.

Anne Maxwell considers that Morrison's "two major books relating to her time in China...were aimed at capturing the 'Old Peking' that Westerners enjoyed reminiscing over, and they ignored the changing nature of the city, in...the poverty, civil unrest and social conflict that resulted from the Japanese occupation."

During her 20-year stay in Sarawak, as well as making independent photographic expeditions which resulted in her books Sarawak (1957) and Life in a Longhouse (1962), from 1960–66 she took photographs on behalf of the government Information Office, Kuching, and trained the department's photographers.

In 1967 the Morrisons moved to Australia and where they lived in Canberra, where she freelanced for the Australian Information Service.

Nicholas Jose counters that; "When she styled herself A Photographer in Old Peking (1985), Hedda Morrison... implies more than a literal interpretation of those words. She finds herself, like a time-traveller, or a space-traveller, in a zone that has its own characteristics, in it but perhaps not of it, in Peking in the 1930s and '40s to record, with the signally modem technique of photography, the riches of a world that has existed proudly and splendidly apart from modernity, technology and Western civilisation and which will now only survive, tragically, in the records of the outsider...for Hedda Morrison being a photographer In Old Peking was more than an idle hobby. It was her role, her vocation."

Edward Stokes writes; 'For Hedda Hammer the craft of photography was uppermost, and through the pursuit of its demands her image making matured in China.

Her style was marked by an intuitive sensibility to light; strong, often challenging vantage points; and fine, carefully balanced compositions.

Equally important was her natural rapport with people...[with] a particular affinity to Chinese and other Asians.'

Graham Johnson in reviewing Hedda Morrison's Hong Kong in Pacific Affairs remarks that "the photographs are magnificent, although generally a little romanticized...a sensitively produced record, interpretation and ethnographic memoir of a Chinese place with global significance at a time that few now remember. No one except Hedda Morrison had the time, the skills and the facility to make permanent the memory of a time and place that no longer exist

In 1990 the Canberra Photographic Society made her a life member.

During her time in Beijing Morrison took many photographs of the old city and its people, temples and markets and continued to record the environments and cultures of the countries in which she lived.

Many of her subjects were disappearing as she photographed them; Chinese civilisation under Japanese occupation and before Communism; Hong Kong transitioning from the irreversible impact of WW2 on its traditional cultures; and the vanishing Ibans and their long houses in Sarawak.

In her student years and for some of her Chinese work she used a Linhof Satzplasmat 9 x 12 cm sheet-film camera.