Hedda Morrison

Hedda Morrison (1908-1991) was a German photographer who created memorable documentary images of Beijing, Hong Kong and Sarawak from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Biography

Born Hedda Hammer in Stuttgart, 13 December 1908, she studied at the State Institute for Photography (Bäyerische Staatslehranstalt für Lichtbildwesen) in Munich. Not finding the political or economic situation in Germany to her liking, in 1933 she took up a position at Hartung's, a German-owned commercial photographic studio in the old Legation Quarter of the city then known as Peiping. During her time in Beijing she took many photographs of the old city and its people, temples and markets, mostly using a Rolleiflex medium-format camera.

In 1940 she met Alastair Morrison, son of the famous George Ernest Morrison, the influential London Times correspondent in Peking. They married in 1946 and left China shortly afterwards, first for Hong Kong and then to Sarawak, where Alastair became a government district officer. During her 20-year stay in Sarawak, Hedda accompanied her husband on official journeys and also made numerous independent photographic tours. She wrote two major books on Sarawak, Sarawak (1957) and Life in a Longhouse (1962).

In 1967 the Morrisons settled in Canberra, Australia. Hedda died in Canberra in 1991, at the age of 82.

Exhibitions of her works have been mounted by the Australian National University, Canberra, the Canberra Photographic Society, the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, and the National Library of Australia. Many of her images are archived in the Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University and at Cornell University, NY. There is a large collection of her German, Asian and Australian work in the Powerhouse Museum.^[1]

Publications

• 1957 Sarawark
• 1962 Life in a Longhouse
• 1985 A Photographer in Old Peking
• 1987 Travels of a photographer in China, 1933-1946

Further reading

• Edward Stokes, Hedda Morrison's Hong Kong: Photographs & Impressions 1946-47 - (Hong Kong University Press, 2005).
• George N. Kates, The Years That Were Fat: Peking, 1933-1940 - (Oxford in Asia Paperbacks, 1989).
• Hedda Morrison, Travels of a Photographer in China, 1933-1946 - (Oxford University Press USA, 1987).
• Hedda Morrison, A Photographer in Old Peking - (Oxford University Press USA, 1986).
• Alastair Morrison, Fair Land Sarawak: Some Recollections of an Expatriate Official - (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1993).

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Pictures by Hedda Morrison.

• Hedda Morrison's images of Hong Kong
• Hedda Morrison Photographs of China, 1933-1946 (Harvard digital archive)
• Hedda Morrison photographic collections, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
• Guide to the Hedda Morrison photographs held at the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collection, Cornell University Library. Photographs and negatives of Sarawak, other places in Malaysia, Indonesia, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia