Morrison, Hedda

Hedda MORRISON (1908–1991), née Hammer, was born in Stuttgart, Germany and studied photography in Munich. She moved to Peiping (Beijing) in 1933 to manage Hartung’s, a German-owned commercial photographic studio and shop in the Legation Quarter. From 1938, until she and her husband left China in 1947, Morrison also worked as a freelance photographer, selling individual prints or thematic albums of her work and creating photographs for other people's books on China. Her photographs thoroughly document lifestyles, trades, handicrafts, landscapes, religious practices, and architectural structures that in many cases have changed or have been destroyed. Books containing reproductions of her photographs include: Travels of a Photographer in China 1933-1946 (OUP, 1987); A Photographer in Old Peking (OUP, 1985) and Hedda Morrison's Hong Kong - Photographs and Impressions by Edward Stokes (Hong Kong University Press, 2005). See the introduction to the Hedda Morrison collection held at the Harvard-Yenching Library; Hedda Morrison images on the Harvard Library catalog (HOLLIS); her Wikipedia entry and an article by Claire Roberts, entitled Quick Time: On Beijing, Spring Festival and the Photographs of Hedda Hammer Morrison.