Hedda Morrison


Hedwig Marie "Hedda" Morrison 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 in Munich. Not finding the political or economic situation in Germany to her liking, in 1933 she took up a position in China at Hartung's, a German-owned commercial photographic studio in the old Legation Quarter of the city then known as Beiping. 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 George Ernest Morrison, the 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 ist turbulent cessation to British Crown Colony. 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.

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 and Life in a Longhouse.

Legacy

Exhibitions of her works have been mounted by the Australian National University, Canberra, the , 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 in Canberra in 1991, at the age of 82.

Publications