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Fan Ho: On the ‘Decisive Moment’
Fan Ho: On the ‘Decisive Moment’
3:57
Video Transcript

(Original language: Cantonese)

FAN HO: I actually prefer black and white. It’s not that I don’t take colour photographs, but I’ve realised one thing. Colours do not fit well in my world. Black and white offers me a distance. What kind of distance? A kind of distance from real life. I think this distance is very important. Real life is multicoloured. Black and white offers a sense of detachment. It allows audiences and viewers to develop their responses and offers the space and depth to ponder and contemplate my ideas.

I like the colour black. It has a kind of power, one that is great and mysterious. It’s like a power that rules over the world. I take photographs casually, with spontaneity. For example, when I lived on MacDonnell Road in the Mid-Levels in Central district, I would walk down from the Mid-Levels. Back then there was no MTR. I would take my camera with me, down from MacDonnell Road, walking the backstreets and narrow lanes through the haze, where there were ordinary folk: ordinary, grassroots, and minority people. The kind of ‘Hong Kong spirit’ that they represented is unforgettable. They constantly struggled to survive.

I always pay attention to the light. I consider photography as the art of light. The light needs to fit my needs, not to mention achieve contrast. So it’s important to wait for the right light. When I am inspired, I can express my state of mind at that moment, the way that I feel. The great writer Honoré de Balzac once said that art is nothing but to move. What a great way to put it.

This one, I have to be honest, I cannot claim credit for. Rather it’s a joke that God played on me. In fact, I wasn’t even taking pictures of the children. The negative was in a square format. I was actually photographing the tram lines. My first impression was that the photograph wasn’t any good. But as I looked at it, I found the two children on the side, which was even more fun and interesting. They were keeping each other company after school. It’s as if there is a kind of rhythm.

I enjoy cropping photographs. It’s like making a movie. I really enjoy the editing process. What’s it like? It can breathe new life into your work. The same goes for photography. That side is lifeless, and this side is alive? Cut that side off, then.

Truly good photographs are not taken with the camera. They come from inside you, your eyes, your brain, your heart, not some cold piece of equipment.

Fan Ho’s striking black-and-white photographs captured everyday life in 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong. Today, while much of the Hong Kong he chronicled no longer exists, a new generation can experience it through his photographs. M+ has twenty-eight seminal photographs by Fan Ho in our collections, providing a unique window into the past.

Fan Ho (American, b. China, 1931–2016) was a photographer, film director, and actor. He spent his early years in Shanghai, where he began taking photographs after receiving his first camera at fourteen. After moving to Hong Kong in 1949, he started taking black-and-white photographs of everyday moments in the city.

Below are ten facts about Fan Ho, told through his photos of Hong Kong.

Sepia-toned photograph depicting a man carrying a basket on a stick slung over his shoulder. He is dressed in casual working clothes. He is walking in front of a large stone wall, on which rectangular light-coloured patches forming random patterns stick out against the dark grey of the stone.

Fan Ho. Pattern, 1956. Archival pigment print. M+ Hong Kong. © Fan Ho

1. Fan Ho started taking photos because of his chronic headaches. As a teenager, he started getting chronic headaches and had to take frequent breaks from reading and writing. During these breaks, he started wandering the streets and was encouraged by his dad to take photos of what he saw.

Sepia-toned photograph depicting a man walking with an empty rickshaw down a street in front of a hazy sunset. The street is deserted apart from a lone silhouette walking in the distance. The sidewalk on his left has pillars with large Chinese lettering going all the way down the street, with numerous signs hanging about his head.

Fan Ho. A Day is Done, 1957. Gelatin silver print. M+ Hong Kong. © Fan Ho

2. He wasn’t trained as a photographer. Instead, he used his intuition, exploring the optics, physics, chemistry, and machinery of photography himself. He received his first camera as a child in Shanghai and developed his photography further after moving to Hong Kong in 1949. He won over 200 awards and was one of the youngest fellows of the Royal Photographic Society in the U.K.

Sepia-toned photograph of a line of people making their way through a fresh produce marketplace. On both sides of the line are various marketplace vendors with produce and baskets of produce laid out.

Fan Ho. The Market Parade, 1963. Gelatin silver print. M+ Hong Kong. © Fan Ho

3. Want to retrace his steps? He once lived on MacDonnell Road in Hong Kong’s Mid-Levels district. ‘When I lived on MacDonnell Road . . . I would walk [downhill] from the Mid-Levels,’ Ho described. ‘Back then, there was no MTR. I would take my camera with me down MacDonnell Road, walking the backstreets and narrow lanes through the haze, where there were ordinary folk: ordinary, grassroots, and minority people. The kind of “Hong Kong spirit” that they represented is unforgettable. They constantly struggled to survive.’ He photographed what moved him because that moved viewers of his photographs and gave his work spirit and life.

Sepia-toned photograph shot from a low perspective with a monkey on all fours in the foreground. Behind the monkey there are a few men carrying cloth-wrapped packages and baskets as well as three boys.

Fan Ho. Get Along, 1960. Gelatin silver print. M+ Hong Kong. © Fan Ho

4. He preferred black-and-white photos. ‘I actually prefer black and white. It’s not that I don’t take colour photographs, but I’ve realised one thing: colours do not fit well in my world. Black and white offers me a distance.’ According to Ho, black-and-white photography offers a sense of detachment from real life. This detachment gives his viewers the space to take in and think about the scenes depicted.

Sepia-toned photograph of an outdoor stone staircase next to an old building. Two adults accompanied by four children are making their way down the staircase, while a third adult is heading up, walking straight through the group.

Fan Ho. Street Scene, 1956. Archival pigment print. M+, Hong Kong. © Fan Ho

5. Fan Ho, also known as a filmmaker, spent decades making movies. To him, film and photography were like twins. Both mediums use images to replace words (in writing), brushstrokes (in painting), and notes (in music) to express what the author or artist feels.

Monochrome photograph of a woman in profile standing in front of a large blank wall in the sunlight. A large diagonal shadow covers half of the wall, starting from the top right corner and ending right in front of the woman’s feet.

Fan Ho. Approaching Shadow, 1954, reprinted 2013. Archival pigment print. M+, Hong Kong. © Fan Ho

6. His years making movies made him a better photographer. Fan Ho’s experience in directing allowed him to capture dramatic and poetic scenes. It taught him to know exactly when to click the shutter to capture the emotions on people’s faces. These storytelling skills could also be used in photography. The stories told through his photographs are what make them interesting. His viewers might be from different cultures, but the ‘human feelings’ in the works are universal.

Sepia-toned photograph depicting a view of a Hong Kong Hong Kong alleyway lined by windows and framed by a dark archway. A staircase can be seen in the bottom right, on which a small child is writing or drawing on a piece of paper in front of them.

Fan Ho. Her Study, 1963. Archival pigment print. M+, Hong Kong. © Fan Ho

7. He took photos spontaneously, making use of ‘the decisive moment’. Fan Ho’s style of photography exemplifies what the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson dubbed the ‘decisive moment’. This method—of waiting for the perfect moment to click the camera shutter—remains a practice that street photographers and photojournalists widely adopt.

Sepia-toned photograph depicting a facade of a building. Silhouettes of three figures stand at three separate balconies of the building. The man on the left is looking down, a woman in the center is resting against the railing and looking to her left, a second man on the right is running to the left. Under the balconies is a series of thin light rectangles. Above the balconies, there are small light squares dotting the facade.

Fan Ho. On the Stage of Life, 1954. Gelatin silver print. M+, Hong Kong. © Fan Ho

8. . . . but he also loved to stage his photographs. Fan Ho photographed On the Stage of Life while studying at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s New Asia College. In anticipation of his future filmmaking career, he already showed an aptitude for directing dramatic performances. The characters in this photograph were his university classmates.

Sepia-toned photograph of a sidewalk where a crouching schoolgirl is holding an umbrella and a schoolboy is walking off to the left. In the far background, there are multiple people walking on the opposite sidewalk.

Fan Ho. School is Over, 1963. Gelatin silver print. M+, Hong Kong. © Fan Ho

9. . . . and to edit his photographs after they were taken. Fan Ho referred to this photo, School is Over, as ‘a joke that God played on me. In fact, I wasn’t even taking a picture of the children. The negative was in a square format. I was actually photographing the tram lines. My first impression was that the photograph wasn’t any good. But as I looked at it, I found the two children on the side, which was even more fun and interesting.’ He radically cropped the photo to be unusually thin and narrow, creating a kind of rhythm in the composition with the shapes of the children, the tram lines, and the drainage holes. Fan Ho enjoyed cropping and editing his photographs, describing this process as ‘like making a movie’. He felt that editing could breathe new life into a work.

Sepia-toned photograph of a stairway leading above ground from a dark recess. A woman is walking down in the foreground while many other figures are walking up. The light from the stairway highlights the clouds of dust in the air.

Fan Ho. Smokey Staircase, 1959. Gelatin silver print. M+, Hong Kong. © Fan Ho

10. Later in life, Fan Ho returned to his earlier works to find new possibilities. He felt that it was like a treasure hunt—the happiness of finding something good was something that money couldn’t buy. In his later works, he also liked to overlay photos to tell new stories, combining and manipulating his old Hong Kong street photos to create something completely different.

This article was originally published on M+ Stories. The English-language version of this article has been updated to reflect the artist’s name as Fan Ho, instead of Ho Fan, at the request of the artist’s estate.

Ellen Oredsson is Editor, Web Content at M+.

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