“The Photographs I Love” 15 — Fan Ho

“What is the secret to the art of photography?
It's experimenting, experimenting, and endless experimenting.”
(Fan Ho)

Fan Ho. “Approaching Shadow” (1954)

The next photographer I want to tell you about is a wound for me, as he is the first, so far, of which unfortunately I don't have any books.

Yet it was in my hands.

On two different occasions and two different countries.

It was 2016 when in the Hong Kong pavilion, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I was struck by a magnificent photograph on the cover of a book: it was Fan Ho.

Opening that book was like falling into a trance. Hypnotized by a magical black and white, timeless photographs.

The price of the book was exorbitant; however, they didn't sell it.

The following year, at the Children's Book Fair in Bologna the same thing: his books only on display, like the Mona Lisa at the Louvre.

Leafing through that book was an explosive mixture of beauty, longing and anger at not having it.

 

Fan Ho, born in Shanghai in October 1931, was a Chinese photographer, director and actor.

At the age of 10, with the start of the war in 1941, young Fan Ho was left by his parents, stranded in Macau, in the care of a domestic servant from Canton.

It was only in 1949 that he managed to emigrate to Hong Kong with his family.

A British colony, Hong Kong in the space of a few years saw its population quadruple fleeing wars, first due to the world war and the invasion of China by the Japanese and later by the civil war between Mao Zedong's communists and the Kuomintang.

In that city his father opened a printing shop and he, still very young, began to photograph with his father's old Kodak Brownie, later with a Rolleiflex lens that his father gave him at the age of 14.

To develop his camera rolls he used the family bathtub, accumulating a significant number of black and white photographs, with which he had told Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s, years in which the city was transforming and preparing to become a large metropolitan center, always with his Rolleiflex K4A which he used throughout his career.

 

Fan Ho

Fan Ho was a member of the Photographic Society of America, the Royal 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 was named one of the “ten best photographers in the world” by the Photographic Society of America between 1958 and 1965.

He was also an established film director, a career that ended in 1996 when he joined his wife and children in San Jose, California, where they emigrated in 1979 to offer their children a viable college education.

His daughter, Claudia, says that as he retired from the cinema and came to America he felt increasingly discontented and discouraged by what he considered a failure to pursue art and his health also began to decline. His family advised him to resume his photographic activity, so he picked up his old negatives and started showing his photographs in various galleries.

A chance encounter with Mark Pinsukanjana of the Modernbook Gallery in Palo Alto will offer him the opportunity to exhibit in 2000 his first solo exhibition since the 1960s. The Modernbook continued to propose his photos and in 2006 they were exhibited in New York, in the same year the “Hong Kong Yesterday” catalog was released which featured the famous image “Approaching Shadow” (taken in 1954) on the cover. Many of the photos he reprinted during this period were first published in his monograph “A Hong Kong Memoir” in 2014, after exhibiting them again at the Modernbook Gallery in 2011 and 2014.

Fan Ho died in San Jose on June 19, 2016 due to pneumonia. His monograph, “Portrait of Hong Kong”, was published in 2017, one year after his death, containing 153 new street photographs that were selected from 500 negatives chosen by Ho before he died in 2016.

His images usually show a fascination for urban life, alleys, slums, markets, streets. Much of his work involved photographing street vendors, girls and children.

He is considered the “Cartier-Bresson of the East”, the “Ansel Adams of Hong Kong”, a superfine master of Street Photography.

 

Fan Ho. “Back to Mother” (1955)

However, anyone who has had the chance to browse through his books has fallen deeply in love with his evocative photographs.

This time I play easy, choosing the one that made him famous.

That “Approaching Shadow”, sold by the Bonhams auction house in Hong Kong in 2015 for 48,000 USD.

“I started to take photographs in Shanghai when I was a very young kid — the first thing I shot was the Bund. I am self-taught.

I love Brahms, Mahler, Stravinsky. Because I studied Chinese literature, I also get inspiration from Chinese poetry and dramas, and also from Shakespeare's dramas, Greek tragedies and Hemingway's novels. I think I accept lots of nourishment from other arts.”

Ho said in a beautiful interview.

It is always interesting and fundamental to listen to the voice of the authors who tell about themselves, in every artistic field.

In these few words Fan Ho gives an essential portrait of himself, and confirms how the inspiration in Photography comes from every angle.

I am not familiar with Chinese dramas, but I am well acquainted with Greek tragedies and Shakespeare's plays, as well as Stravinsky's music.

Each of them united by power, by strength, but with a perfect geometric design. Almost circular.

 

Fan Ho. “Arrow” (1958)

 

I am fascinated by his confession of love for these authors, because the first thing that immediately emerges, looking at his photographs (or at least many of them), is the continuous play of light and shadow.

Emblematic is precisely this “Approaching Shadow”, get close to shadow  but “approaching” is also entering, going inside...

The philosophical, rather than aesthetic, doubt remains whether the imposing shadow that falls at the woman's feet is one step away from swallowing it, or whether the woman is waiting to get lost in it with a push of the body from the wall, to enter inside it.

But let's read how Ho himself describes it:

“I saw a white wall near Causeway Bay. I asked my cousin to stand there, and she acted as the girl facing the approaching shadow. I made the composition first, and then I finished it by bringing in the triangular dark shadow in the darkroom. There was no shadow on the wall, actually. It means her youth will fade away, and that everyone has the same destiny. It’s a little tragic.”

 

Here is the mystery of this photograph.

Let's not forget that Ho was also a skilled film director.

And that as a teenager he loved to write novels, short stories and poems, but every time he read a book he suffered from a headache, so he translated his love of writing into writing with images.

But what one loves is never lost, it's transfigured.

Seeing that wall, he had in mind a story, a theatrical and tragic representation – as he himself says: that is, the loss of youth, which is the imposing shadow that approaches the young girl, with no way out.

A shadow that didn't exist, but that he created in the dark room, as if it were his writing laboratory.

And then the Greek tragedies come to mind, terrible and essential as carved in granite.

The dark plots that weave in the shadows of castles in the plays of the English bard.

 

Fan Ho. “Sun Rays” (1959)

Then you go back to looking at the photographs of the 50s and 60s of his China, and it seems to see a constant: Fan Ho is always looking for the moment when the human being is enlightened, escapes, frees himself from the grip of the shadows. all around it. It was a triangle, a square of space, but no longer swallowed up by shadows, like a spot of light on the stage of life.

But it is not always planned, indeed Fan Ho is a great admirer of Cartier-Bresson, he too is chasing his “decisive moment” in the streets and markets of Hong Kong.

“I would take a photo at the right moment, just like the French great master Henri Cartier-Bresson. You wait for the subject that can move you, that can touch your heart, no matter if it’s an old man or an old woman, or even a kid or a dog. Then when you come to the right position, and combine it with the right background and other people, and also match it with the lighting, you click the shutter at that decisive moment. And you must wait, and wait, and wait, and have patience. Sometimes I waited in the street for a few hours. And sometimes, if I was lucky, I would come home with something.”

 

Because life isn't a script, and you don't always get what you had in mind.

Which is also its charm.

But for Ho it will also become a pain. Because the magic of that light will never find it again.

He will return again in 2006, the last time, in Hong Kong, in the places he loved as a young man, Sha Tin, Tai Po, Castle Peak, but he will no longer recognize them, much less “his” light.

Because it is a naïve illusion to believe that the light is always the same for each of us. The whole perceptible world enters our eyes in a unique way, which belongs only to us.

“It was hard to take photographs because of the lighting. It no longer exists. When I came back, I could not find the atmosphere I loved from half a century ago. I don’t know why. Maybe I am old, or old-fashioned. Maybe I am remembering the past too much.”

 

It is tender to read these words, just before his death.

Looking at those black and white images that seem out of time.

It moves and at the same time gives a thrill if you approach those that described his photo-icon.

Because he himself was a victim of the Greek tragedy he had concocted at the time: the shadow that approaches us and devours our light of the past, to say goodbye, forever, to our youth that will never return.

 

And yes, it's a little tragic.

 

Fan Ho. “Hong Kong, Venice” (1962)

READ ALSO:

• "The Photographs I Love" 13 — Karolin Klüppel
• "The Photographs I Love" 14 — Shahidul Alam 

Official Website: Fan Ho Photography  
Interview: "Ho Fan: In Memory of Hong Kong's Iconic Photographer"

 

Italian version