Peking is one of the great cities of the world and one of the most fascinating. It has changed so radically in the past thirty years that the city's fabulous past is in danger of being lost to memory. This memoir of Peking from 1933 to 1946, compiled by one of the finest photographers who has ever worked in Asia, is thus a significant document and will be of interest not only to longstanding China-watchers but also to the many tourists who have been privileged to visit Peking in the decade since the city has again been opened to the West. The photographs provide a unique insight into life in Peking in the years preceeding the Communist revolution of 1949. The photographer, Hedda Morrison, left Nazi Germany in 1933 to manage a German-owned photographic studio in Peking. Her sympathetic approach to her subject is manifested in the large number of photographs showing Chinese people from all walks of life at work and enjoying their leisure. Architectural studies provide valuable evidence of buildings and monuments that have since changed or disappeared, and photographs taken beyond Peking and in the Western Hills convey the beauty of the north China landscape.

Peking is one of the great cities of the world and one of the most fascinating. It has changed so radically in the past thirty years that the city's fabulous past is in danger of being lost to memory. This memoir of Peking from 1933 to 1946, compiled by one of the finest photographers who has ever worked in Asia, is thus a significant document and will be of interest not only to longstanding China-watchers but also to the many tourists who have been privileged to visit Peking in the decade since the city has again been opened to the West. The photographs provide a unique insight into life in Peking in the years preceeding the Communist revolution of 1949. The photographer, Hedda Morrison, left Nazi Germany in 1933 to manage a German-owned photographic studio in Peking. Her sympathetic approach to her subject is manifested in the large number of photographs showing Chinese people from all walks of life at work and enjoying their leisure. Architectural studies provide valuable evidence of buildings and monuments that have since changed or disappeared, and photographs taken beyond Peking and in the Western Hills convey the beauty of the north China landscape.

Chinese opera embraces over 360 different styles of theatre that make one of the richest performance arts in the world. It combines music, speech, poetry, mime, acrobatics, stage fighting, vivid face-painting and exquisite costumes. First experiences of Chinese opera can be baffling because its vocabulary of stagecraft is familiar only to the seasoned aficionado. Chinese Opera: The Actor’s Craft makes the experience more accessible for everyone. This book uses breath-taking images of Chinese opera in performance by Hong Kong photographer Siu Wang-Ngai to illustrate and explain Chinese opera stage technique. The book explores costumes, gestures, mime, acrobatics, props and stage techniques. Each explanation is accompanied by an example of its use in an opera and is illustrated by in-performance photographs. Chinese Opera: The Actor’s Craft provides the reader with a basic grammar for understanding uniquely Chinese solutions to staging drama.

Representing the best of the Holmes archive and brimming with brilliant color photographs, this rare window on the world of 100 years ago will transport readers to a time that has all but evaporated.

Accompanies an exhibition held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, 8 February-1 May 2011.

A humorous and moving coming-of-age story that brings a unique, not-quite-outsider’s perspective to China’s shift from ancient empire to modern superpower Raised in a strict Chinese-American household in the suburbs, Val Wang dutifully got good grades, took piano lessons, and performed in a Chinese dance troupe—until she shaved her head and became a leftist, the stuff of many teenage rebellions. But Val’s true mutiny was when she moved to China, the land her parents had fled before the Communist takeover in 1949. Val arrives in Beijing in 1998 expecting to find freedom but instead lives in the old city with her traditional relatives, who wake her at dawn with the sound of a state-run television program playing next to her cot, make a running joke of how much she eats, and monitor her every move. But outside, she soon discovers a city rebelling against its roots just as she is, struggling too to find a new, modern identity. Rickshaws make way for taxicabs, skyscrapers replace hutong courtyard houses, and Beijing prepares to make its debut on the world stage with the 2008 Olympics. And in the gritty outskirts of the city where she moves, a thriving avant-garde subculture is making art out of the chaos. Val plunges into the city’s dizzying culture and nightlife and begins shooting a documentary, about a Peking Opera family who is witnessing the death of their traditional art. Brilliantly observed and winningly told, Beijing Bastard is a compelling story of a young woman finding her place in the world and of China, as its ancient past gives way to a dazzling but uncertain future.

This book is the first extensive survey of early Chinese photographers in any language. It is profusely illustrated with more than 400 photographs, many of which are published here for the first time, including a fine selection of Foochow landscapes from the studios of Lai Fong, China's leading photographer during this period, and Tung Hing. Early chapters introduce the historical milieu from which the earliest Chinese photographers emerged and illuminate the beginnings of photography in China and contemporary Chinese reactions to its introduction. Early Chinese commercial photography - both portrait and landscape - are also discussed with reference to similar genres in a more international context. Individual chapters are devoted to Chinese photographers in Peking, Hong Kong, Canton, Shanghai, Foochow, Amoy, Hankow, Tientsin and other ports, Macau and Formosa. These are followed by a series of appendices: writings on photography in China by John Thomson and Isaac Taylor Headland and an invaluable guide to the identification of photographs from the Afong Studio. It concludes with an extensive bibliography, general and regional chronologies, and a biographical index. Publisher's note.

From Versailles to the home vegetable garden, from worlds imagined by artists to food production recorded by journalists, The Photographer in the Garden traces the garden's rich history in photography and delights readers with spectacular photographs. An informative essay from curator Jamie M. Allen and commentaries by Sarah Anne McNear broaden our understanding of photography and explore our unique relationship with nature through the garden. This is a sublime book bringing together some of history's most stunning photography.

In September 1946, when the photographer Hedda Morrison reached Hong Kong, it remained little changed from decades earlier. Acclaimed for her images of China taken in the 1930s and 1940s, Hedda Morrison delighted in recording the patterns of everyday life. Now, captivated by Hong Kong and its people, she embraced the colony's diversity. For six months, cameras in hand, Morrison roamed its districts, streets, coasts and valleys. Within years, much of what Hedda Morrison witnessed in 1946-47 would be swept aside. Yet when she was there Hong Kong life still had its old feel and traditions, with fine colonial precincts, tenement streets, bustling markets, itinerant hawkers, fisherfolk and rice farmers. In this book, Morrison's telling images are complemented by Edward Stokes' essays portraying the postwar years. Hedda Morrison's photographs are the work of a masterful, artistic photographer. However, fewer than thirty of this book's photographs had been published before. It was those images, first sighted in a 1946 government report, that led Edward Stokes to begin searching for Morrison's original negatives--which later were discovered at the Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University. This is a unique record of a now vanished Hong Kong--the most complete pictorial account of how the colony looked during the decades from the early 1930s to the 1950s. Hedda Morrison's photographs will appeal to all who value documentary images and Asian history. This new edition contains over three-quarters of the photographs from Hedda Morrison's Hong Kong, the original edition of this book published in 2005. The complete English text, which has been widely praised, accompanies the photographs. Reviews of Hedda Morrison's Hong Kong appear below and on the back jacket.