A Memoir
Fan Ho Hong Kong Yesterday Video
24,077 likes 4 talking about this. We are the publisher of Fan Ho's books: Hong Kong Yesterday, The Living Theatre, and A Hong Kong Memoir. DISCLAIMER: Modernbook,Themes+Projects. Hong Kong Yesterday is a beautiful look at Hong Kong during the 1950's and 1960's by award winning photographer, Fan Ho. This version will be the 6th printing of this title. This is a unique series of images with no image duplication between the other two books, The Living Theatre and Fan Ho: Hong Kong Memoir. Ho passed away in San Jose in 2016. Modernbook continues to publish three monographs of his work — Hong Kong Yesterday, The Living Theatre, and A Hong Kong Memoir. “Fan Ho is remembered for creating some of the most iconic images of mid-century Hong Kong,” says Yedinak. Hong Kong Yesterday book by Fan Ho. On Sale On Sale Fan Ho Perpetual Calendar (Hong Kong Yesterday Series) $29.95 $24.95. Fan Ho, nicknamed ‘the great master’ earned his fame as one Asia’s most beloved street photographers capturing Hong Kong in the 50’s and 60’s. Fan Ho’s photographic career started in Shanghai at the early age of 14 when given his first Kodak Brownie for his birthday from his father.
Fan Ho used one camera for his whole career: a Rolleiflex 3.5 series camera, which he bought when he was 18 years old. The Rolleiflex has a twin lens design: one to view the subject, and another to capture the image.
Light and shadow combine to form precise shapes: a beam of light intersects a darkened stairwell; pitched shadows zigzag sharply across a sunny street; a diagonal shadow divides a smooth concrete wall in two. Yet there is human warmth amidst this geometry. Stark light illuminates a man bearing a heavy load of wicker baskets, head bowed with the weight of the stick across his shoulder. An older man holds his hands behind his back in a pensive manner as he takes a nonchalant, sandal-clad step forward. Unaware of their place in these arrangements, they have been captured by a patient young man, hidden behind the twin lens of a Rolleiflex camera.
In his early twenties, suffering from headaches and prescribed walks in the city by doctors as a break from his studies, Fan Ho felt too self-conscious to wander Hong Kong without a purpose. His solution was to take up photography. Rather than focus on the bustle of the main streets, he sought out intriguing settings and used to wait for up to a day, sometimes in vain, for a protagonist with whom he could empathise, whether a child, an old man, a young woman, or even a cat. Speaking in 2014 to the South China Morning Post, Ho said, “I must wait until there is something that touches my heart. There must be humanity in art. If you feel nothing when you click the shutter, you give the viewer nothing to respond to.”
The scenes he recorded are of a Hong Kong long since passed: moments of introspection play out in the shadows of still streets. Even in the early 1950s, when most of these images were taken, Hong Kong’s population was doubling from an influx of refugees fleeing the Communist Party’s war with the Kuomintang, yet Fan Ho was able to find quiet moments in the city, documenting traces of traditional Cantonese life as they began to disappear: hand carts pushed by tired men across tramlines in the road; barefoot children dashing past markets and alleyways busy with hawkers and barbers. His photographs memorialise this period, but simultaneously depict an abstract, even universal, vision of human life.
Ho went on to win well over 200 awards for his photography — most before he had reached the age of 30. He was ranked best photographer in the world by the Photographic Society of America in 1958, and held his first solo exhibit in Hong Kong a year later. But, following this early success, Ho put photography to one side and pursued a career acting and directing in the Hong Kong film industry, until his retirement in 1996 when he moved to San Jose, California.
Looking back over his career from this vantage point, Ho developed a longing to revisit the images he had created as a young man. While exploring his new Bay Area neighbourhood, he started frequenting Modernbook, a bookstore and gallery in Palo Alto. “We first met Fan Ho in 2000,” recalls Bryan Yedinak, co-owner of Modernbook and its gallery counterpart, Themes + Projects. “He would come in as a customer on a weekly basis, talking about art and photography with us for hours. A few months into our friendship, he told us he was a photographer, and asked if we were interested in seeing some images he had taken 50 years ago in Hong Kong. A week later, he arrived with an IKEA plastic bag filled with vintage prints. As young gallerists at the time, we had never seen anything like it. He was thoughtful and open in telling us when and how he had made the pictures: the time of day, the angles, the film and paper type, the darkroom and cropping techniques. He asked us if we would show them to our customers, and we agreed.” That year, Modernbook and Fan Ho held a solo exhibition of his Hong Kong work. It was the first time anyone had seen the images since the 1960s.
Fan Ho Hong Kong Yesterday Youtube
Ho passed away in San Jose in 2016. Modernbook continues to publish three monographs of his work — Hong Kong Yesterday, The Living Theatre, and A Hong Kong Memoir. “Fan Ho is remembered for creating some of the most iconic images of mid-century Hong Kong,” says Yedinak. “People are just drawn to his work: there is a magic in his pictures that cannot be put into words.”
- Words: Ollie Horne
- Photos: Fan Ho
- Special Thanks: Themes + Projects
Fan Ho’s (born in Shanghai in 1931) photographic career started at the early age of 14 when given his first Kodak Brownie from his father. Within the first year he won his first award in 1949 in Shanghai. At the age of 18, he acquired his twin lens Rolleiflex with which he captured all his famous work after he moved to Hong Kong with his parents and continued to purse his love for photography.
Dubbed the “Cartier-Bresson of the East”, Fan Ho patiently waited for ‘the decisive moment’; very often a collision of the unexpected, framed against a very clever composed background of geometrical construction, patterns and texture. He often created drama and atmosphere with backlit effects or through the combination of smoke and light. His favorite locations were the streets, alleys and markets around dusk or life on the sea.
What made his work so intensely human is his love for the common Hong Kong people: Coolies, vendors, hawkers selling fruits and vegetables, kids playing in the street or doing their homework, people crossing the street… He never intended to create a historic record of the city’s buildings and monuments; rather he aimed to capture the soul of Hong Kong, the hardship and resilience of its citizens.
Fan Ho was most prolific in his teens and 20s and created his biggest body of work before he reached the tender age of 28. His work did not go by unnoticed at his time. He won close to 300 local and international awards and titles in his day through competing in the salons. His talent was also spotted by the film industry where he started out as an actor before moving to film directing until retiring at 65.
Fan Ho is a Fellow of the Photographic Society and the Royal Society of Arts in England, and an Honorary Member of the Photographic societies of Singapore, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, France, Italy and Belgium. He most recently won a 'Life-time Achievement Award, the 2nd Global Chinese International Photography Award, China, 2015' by the Chinese Photographic Society (Guangzhou).
Fan Ho Hong Kong Yesterday Book
During his long career he has taught photography and film making at a dozen universities worldwide. His work is in many private and public collection of which most notable are: M+ Museum, Hong Kong, Heritage Museum, Hong Kong, Bibliothèque National de France, Paris, France, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, USA and many more.