Hedda Morrison

Hedda Morrison
Hedda Morrison, 1941 by Alastair Morrison
Born	Hedwig Marie Hammer (1908-12-13)13 December 1908 Stuttgart, Germany
Died	3 December 1991(1991-12-03) (aged 82) Canberra, Australia
Nationality	German
Education	Bäyerische Staatslehranstalt für Lichtbildwesen, Munich, Germany
Known for	Documentary photography
Spouse	Alastair Morrison (1946–1991, her death)

Hedwig Marie "Hedda" Morrison (née 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.

Biography

Born Hedda Hammer in Stuttgart, 13 December 1908. 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 encouraged her resolve to become a photographer. After her secondary education at Konigen Katherina Stift Gymnasium für Mådschen, Stuttgart, she commenced study in medicine at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, but persuaded her parents to allow her to study (1929–31) at the at the State Institute for Photography (Bäyerische Staatslehranstalt für Lichtbildwesen) in Munich, Germany'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.

Hammer was apprenticed during the Great Depression in the commercial studios of the technically exacting Adolf Lazi at Stuttgart, and gained further experience at the Olga Linckelmann Photographische Werkstatte, Hamburg. Though she was trained in the aesthetics of the New Objectivity of the period, her interest was social documentary; recording traditional human cultures in the setting of their rural environment.

Not finding the political or economic situation in Germany to her liking, in 1933 she took up a position in China to manage Hartung's, 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 basic Mandarin Chinese, and in her spare time she made solo expeditions into parts of northern China. From 1938 during the Japanese occupation of the city, as a German citizen, she was free to leave Hartung's to work as a freelance photographer. Though the living was precarious, she found work photographing artefacts for a wealthy British dealer in Chinese arts and crafts, Caroline Frances Bieber, who collected for the Brooklyn Museum in New York, and thus 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." With Bieber and writer Beatrice Kates, she worked 1937–8 documenting household furniture, a project published in 1948. Her photographs 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).

In 1940 she met Alastair Morrison, son of the London Times correspondent in Peking 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 dilomat. She married Morrison in 1946 and they left the unrest in China shortly afterwards, first for Hong Kong and then to Sarawak, where Alastair became a government district officer during its turbulent cessation to British Crown Colony (1946–61). During her 20-year stay in Sarawak, Hedda accompanied her husband on official journeys and also made numerous independent photographic tours. In 1967 the Morrisons settled in Canberra, Australia where she freelanced for the Australian Information Service and in 1990 the Canberra Photographic Society made her a life member.

Photography

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. Though in her student years and for some of her Chinese work she used a Linhof Satzplasmat sheet-film camera, throughout her career she made 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.

Reception

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...'

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.'

Recognition

In 1955, through the Camera Press agency which was handling her work, Edward Steichen saw Morrison's flash-lit photograph of a festive Dayak group in indigenous dress laughing with a young man in a western-style shirt and wearing a watch. He chose it for the section 'Adult Play' in the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man, seen by 9 million viewers.

Subsequently, Morrison wrote two major books on Sarawak, Sarawak (1957) and Life in a Longhouse (1962).

Legacy

Exhibitions of her works have been mounted in Singapore, the United States, and in Australia 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.

Hedda died, after a sudden illness, in Canberra in 1991, at the age of 82, and was cremated in Norwood. She was survived by her husband Alastair. Jack Waterford in her obituary described Hedda Morrison as "a perky sparrow with.a wonderful dry wit and a touch of wickedness [who] practiced her art to the last."

Publications

• Morrison, Hedda. Sarawak.London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1957.
• ---. Life in a Longhouse. Kuching: Borneo Literature Bureau, 1962.
• ---. A Photographer in Old Peking. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1985.
• ---. Travels of a Photographer in China, 1933 - 1946. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1987.
• Kates, George N. (George Norbert); Morrison, Hedda, 1908-1991; Bieber, Caroline F. (Caroline Frances) (1962), Chinese household furniture ([Facsimile reprint ed.] ed.), Dover Publications, ISBN 978-0-486-20958-6{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
• George N. Kates (1952), The years that were fat Peking, 1933-1940 ([1st ed.] ed.), New York Harper, retrieved 26 October 2020
• Eberhard, Wolfram and Hedda Morrison. Hua Shan: the Taoist Sacred Mountain in West China. Hong Kong: Vetch and Lee, 1973.
• Morrison, Hedda, K. F. Wong and Leigh Wright. Vanishing World, The Ibans of Borneo. New York: John Weatherhill, 1972.

Publications about

• Lum, Raymond. ‘Hedda Morrison and Her Photographs of China.’ In Treasures of the Yenching: Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Harvard-Yenching Library. Exhibition Catalogue, edited by Patrick Hanan, 297–300. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2003
• Roberts, Claire. ‘China Bound: Hedda Hammer.’ Harvard Library Bulletin 23, no. 3 (2012): 50–51
• Roberts, Claire (ed). In Her View, The Photographs of Hedda Morrison in China and Sarawak 1933 - 67. Haymarket, NSW: Powerhouse Publishing, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, 1993.
• Roberts, Claire. In Her View: Hedda Morrison's Photographs of Peking, 1933-46, East Asian History, Number 4 (Dec. 1992), pp. 81
• Roberts, Claire. 'Hedda Morrison's Jehol - A Photographic Journey', East Asian History, Number 22 (Dec. 2001), pp. 1-128. Canberra: Institute of Advanced Studies, Australian National University
• Stokes, Edward (2009). Hong Kong As It Was, Hedda Morrison’s Photographs 1946 – 47. Hong Kong: The Photographic Heritage Foundation with Hong Kong University Press. ISBN 978-962-209-966-1.
• Stokes, Edward (2015). Hedda Morrison's Hong Kong: Photographs & Impressions 1946–47. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Conservation Photography Foundation with Hong Kong University Press. ISBN 962-209-754-5.
• Waterford, Jack. ‘Photographic Chronicler of Pre-Communist China.’ Canberra Times, 5 December 1991, 7

Exhibitions

• 1940: Hedda Morrison's Chinese Photographs. Central Park, Peking, China.
• 1949: Photographs by Hedda Morrison, Brooklyn Museum, New York.
• 1955: included in The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
• 1957: Photographs of Sarawak, Raffles Museum, Singapore, curated by Prof. Gibson-Hill
• 1958, 17 March – 22 April: Photographs of Sarawak, Santa Fe Folk Art Museum, touring from Raffles Museum, Singapore
• 1967: Peking: 1933-1946 - A Photographic Impression, Menzies Library, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT.
• 1986: featured in An Asian Experience: 1933-6, organised by the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Fisher Library Foyer, University of Sydney.
• 1990: Travels of an Extraordinary Photographer: Hedda Morrison - A Retrospective Exhibition, organised by the Canberra Photographic Society, The Link, Canberra Theatre, Canberra, ACT.
• 1993: In Her View: The Photographs of Hedda Morrison in China and Sarawak 1933-67, curator Claire Roberts Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, NSW.
• 1994: In Her View: The Photographs of Hedda Morrison in China and Sarawak 1933-67, National Library of Australia, Canberra, ACT.
• 1995: 8 photographs of the Flinders Ranges (c.1971) featured in Beyond the Picket Fence, National Library of Australia, Canberra, ACT.
• 2002: Old Peking: Photographs by Hedda Morrison 1933-46, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, NSW.
• 2002, May-June: Old Peking: Photographs by Hedda Morrison 1933-46, Art Museum of the China Millenium Monument, Beijing.

Awards

• 1965: Pegawai Bitang Sarawak (Officer of the Order of the Star of Sarawak) for her work by the Sarawak Government
• 1990: Canberra Photographic Society Life Member.

Further reading

• 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).
• Roberts, Claire (2016). "Morrison, Hedwig Marie (Hedda) (1908–1991)". Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. ISBN 978-0-522-84459-7. ISSN 1833-7538. OCLC 70677943.

External links

• 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