Name Hedda Morrison | Died 1991, Canberra, Australia | |
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Books Life in a Longhouse, Travels of a Photographer in China, 1933-1946, Sarawak | ||
香港1946-1947《逝影留蹤》
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.
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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.