Astonishing Victoria Harbour Hong Kong Life is Exposed
Voyage Through Time celebrates Victoria Harbour Hong Kong
Man and chickens, this harbour-side hawker has a clutch of fowls. Some are tied up with the grass string used by traders. Others are in a split-bamboo poultry carrier, Hedda Morrison
Port of Victoria Harbour Hong Kong
The port of Hong Kong and Victoria Harbour have always been key to this remarkable, ever-changing city. Voyage Through Time, a photo exhibition that opens at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum explores the dynamic changes to Hong Kong’s port during the middle of the twentieth century.
Classic view of Central, this photo must be from, or after, 1973 – when the Connaught Centre (today’s Jardine House) was completed. The building was then Hong Kong’s tallest, Brian Brake
The exhibition’s photos, taken between the 1940s and 1970s, portray Victoria Harbour, the port, its people, shipping, and the Tanka boat people.
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The images cover those crucible decades that saw Hong Kong recover postwar. Then, despite challenges and setbacks, its economic and social resurgence gradually took hold.
Victoria Harbour Hong Kong by 3 Photographers
Three photographers took the exhibition’s images. In the order of their Voyage Through Time photos, they are Hedda Morrison, Brian Brake and Edward Stokes. Each, in their own manner, captured Hong Kong’s central features: the visually rich harbour, its people and maritime life.
Kowloon Bay vast expanse, in 1946, from above the village of Ah Kung Ngam Tsuen, Hedda Morrison looked across to Kowloon Bay. Kai Tak airport is visible below Lion Rock, Hedda Morrison
Each of the three – one born in Germany, one born in New Zealand, and one who grew up here – found fascination in Hong Kong’s people.
Although with different intentions, all three recorded daily life around the harbour. Thus, they passed on to our times the photographic legacy shown in this Hong Kong Maritime Museum exhibition.
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During the immediate postwar years, many people were gaunt from hunger, as seen in many of Hedda Morrison’s black-and-white photos.
Daily life 1960s
By the 1960s, as Brian Brake’s rich array of colour photos suggests, higher incomes allowed more and better food. In 1979, when Edward Stokes took his photographs, virtually everyone was reasonably fed.
Landing small fish, rattan baskets of small fish, probably the catch from nighttime inshore fishing, are carried by poles onto trucks. Long shadows show it is soon after daybreak, Hedda Morrison
Almost eighty years ago, in September 1946, Hedda Morrison arrived in Hong Kong from China and stayed for six months.
Hedda Morrison postwar story
During that time, Morrison photographed widely, especially around the harbour. Her photos are a telling visual record of immediate postwar maritime Hong Kong.
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Hedda Hammer was born in Germany in 1908. After training in photography, a work opportunity led her to China in 1933. In Beijing and other parts of China, Hammer pursued her craft.
Recording the lives of ordinary people was her abiding passion. In mid-1946, before departing from Beijing, she married Alastair Morrison.
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The war had left Hong Kong physically and mentally hollowed out. Allied bombing had brought severe – though localised – damage around the harbour.
Tsim Sha Tsui sampans, Photographed from Tsim Sha Tsui, harbour sampans frame Hong Kong’s enduring view – Victoria Peak rising above Central District. Entire families lived on small sampans, Hedda Morrison
In 1946, as Morrison’s photos show, sunken ships remained to be salvaged. Yet, with enormous drive and effort, the port and its people resumed operations relatively quickly.
Victoria Harbour held promise for future
Hedda Morrison’s artful, above all human documentary photos – taken with a Rolleicord twin-lens camera – offer telling and often touching reminders of life around the harbour: lives that, by our modern standards, seem unimaginably poor yet hold great promise for the future.
Brian Brake life and spirit
Brian Brake arrived in Hong Kong in 1957 after a journey from London. That adventure – through the Middle East, South and East Asia – cemented Brake’s ambition: to become a photojournalist. From 1962 to 1976, he was based in Hong Kong.
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Brian Brake was born in New Zealand in 1927, and after school, he pursued photography. During his middle life, Brake’s photos captured far-flung places.
Kai Tak runway, by the mid-1950s, Kai Tak airport could barely handle modern aircraft. Hong Kong responded with its finger runway, opened in 1958 and a world first, Brian Brake
Then, in 1970, TIME-LIFE commissioned him to shoot Hong Kong for its Great Cities series. Leica in hand, Brake recorded Hong Kong life, people and spirit: revitalised by an economic and social resurgence. Brake’s book (displayed in the exhibition) was first published in 1977.
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During the 1950s, Hong Kong rapidly transformed itself from an entrepot to a manufacturing centre. Its population, economy and shipping increased into the 1960s.
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Almost everything improved. The harbour saw reclamations, higher buildings and industrial estates.
The Kai Tak finger runway was acclaimed, Hong Kong flowered as a tourist mecca and the city became one of the Asian tiger economies.
Edward Stokes Hong Kong heritage
Edward Stokes grew up in Hong Kong and returned in 1993. For many years, he photographed the landscape for nature conservation photos and books.
Building one junk, At Ap Lei Chau in 1979, a Guangdong style fishing junk is being built. The hull is almost identical to those that Morrison had photographed in 1946, Edward Stokes
Then, he began exploring Hong Kong’s photo heritage, as seen in his previous books and exhibitions.
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Stokes was born in Australia in 1948, but his family moved to Hong Kong, where he grew up. Much later, during the 1970s, while living in Australia, he became a self-taught photographer.
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An early project was an Australian journal story about Hong Kong.
For it, he took the 1979 photos in Voyage Through Time with his trusted Olympus cameras.
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During that long-ago visit, Ed Stokes met in person, for the first and only time, someone whose own images had helped to inspire him to become a photographer:
Repairing two trawlers, This low, wide-angle photo was taken at one of Ap Lei Chau’s boat yards, almost exactly where Hedda Morrison had photographed Ap Lei Chau some 30 years before, Edward Stokes
Brian Brake, who was also visiting Hong Kong. Life and photography are often intertwined by fate.
Voyage Through Time
Voyage Through Time is presented by the Hong Kong Maritime Museum, which originated with the Hong Kong Photo Heritage Programme and its curator, Edward Stokes.
The Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation HK and The Swire Group Charitable Trust are the exhibition’s sponsors. Voyage Through Time is originated by The Hong Kong Photo Heritage Programme and its curator Edward Stokes.
Text Edward Stokes / Photos Hedda Morrison, Brian Brake and Edward Stokes
