Street life of Hong Kong in the 1950s captured by a teenage photographer’s lens
Historical black and white photos captured by 83-year-old photographer Fan Ho show us dust-laden days of Hong Kong in the 1950s. Hong-Kong based photographer Fan Ho is an award-wining artist, who has won more than 280 awards from international exhibitions and competitions globally since 1956 and was rated one of the Most Influential Asian Photographers by Invisible Photographer, Asia in 2012. The photographer’s memoir titled “Fan Ho: A Hong Kong Memoir” concerns historical street life of Hong Kong in the 1950s and onwards as he’s a teenager. In the 1950s, Hong-Kong street was full with shabby houses and dirty alleys and filled with vendors, coolies, rickshaw drivers, etc. Ho come to Hong-Kong from Shanghai in 1949, taking pictures with his Rolleiflex was this teenager’s greatest pleasure; however, photographing strangers in the streets in those days was unwelcome to many superstitious people, who believed that taking pictures would take their spirits away. “With a knife in his hand, a pig butcher said he would chop me. He wanted his spirit back,” the photographer told South China Morning Post in the interview.
