Forgotten China Revealed with New Electronic Tools

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November 18, 1999

SEARCH THE GAZETTE

HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

In the 1930s and ’40s, behind the walls of China’s Forbidden City, a simple way of life was rapidly changing.

Today, little of that old life is visible in Beijing (formerly Peking), where Tiananmen Square and Mao’s mausoleum have replaced a grove of trees to the city’s south, and modern traffic concerns have eliminated the wooden memorial archways that once accented the city streets.

German-born photographer Hedda Hammer Morrison (1908-1991) could often be seen bicycling through the city with a Rolleiflex camera around her neck, capturing those times through her lens as both participant and observer.

Morrison, who left her native Germany in 1933 shortly after receiving her training in photography, came to Peking as the manager of a camera shop, where she befriended a wide variety of travelers and residents who came from across the globe. In 1938, she was employed by a wealthy Englishwoman who provided a salary and accommodations but made few demands on her time, allowing Morrison to devote herself to her own photography.

Although Morrison’s name is not as well-known today as it was during the ’30s and ’40s, her photographs of Peking provide a rare, detailed look into China’s past. Taken between 1933 and 1946, the collection documents the architecture, streetscapes, clothing, religious practices, and crafts that have all but disappeared from modern Beijing. The photographs are artfully composed, but also constitute an invaluable historical record.

Upon her death in 1991, Morrison bequeathed her collection of approximately 10,000 negatives of China, many with accompanying prints she’d printed and cropped, to the Harvard-Yenching Library. A similar collection from the years she later spent in the British colony of Sarawak on the island of Borneo now reside at Cornell University, while her exhibition prints remain at Australia’s Powerhouse Museum.

Unfortunately, the Harvard-Yenching Library’s collection is fragile and uncataloged, making its contents unavailable to researchers, faculty, students, and the public. Few scholars have seen the collection, and many do not even know that it exists.

But that is changing. A pilot project of the Library Digital Initiative (LDI) is enabling the library to catalog, preserve, and reformat these images into accessible digital form. The goal is to make the images available for teaching and research in the areas of East Asian studies, history, architecture, fine arts, sociology, religion, ethnology, and popular culture, says Project Manager Raymond Lum, librarian for the Western Languages Collection in the Harvard-Yenching Library, and Asian bibliographer in Widener Library.

Morrison’s photographs document everyday people and scenes – temples, the city’s gates, street vendors, markets, and craftspeople. At the time they were taken, she sold them as individual prints, compiled thematic albums, and commissioned work for other people’s books on China. She published some of the images in her own books, including A Photographer in Old Peking (Oxford University Press, 1985; 1946) and Travels of a Photographer in China 1933-1946 (Oxford University Press, 1987).

"Hedda Morrison had a very artistic eye," Lum says. "The images we’re digitizing are the images the way she saw them and cropped them." There are some images in the collection that were not printed by Morrison; these have been printed by the Preservation & Imaging Services Department in the Harvard College Library, and will be labeled differently from those printed by Morrison herself.

Photo Collections May Go Electronic
Lum hopes that the success of this first digital imaging and electronic cataloging effort will enable the Harvard-Yenching Library to continue the process with its other photographic collections. The Library also holds a series of photographs taken by Morrison in Hong Kong in 1946, during the year she lived there with her husband, Alastair Morrison. Some of these images appeared in that city’s first postwar annual report, Lum says. The collection also includes some of Morrison’s photographs copied from a private collection. Those photographs came to Lum’s attention after an article about the LDI appeared in the Harvard Gazette last spring, prompting the owner of the prints to call and offer them for reproduction.

The two-year project, funded by the LDI Internal Challenge Grant Program, is well under way. A cataloger has been hired and the process of digitizing test images has begun. According to Lum, now that preliminary work is finished, digitizing the collection will take approximately 18 months.

Preliminary work included having the Harvard University Library Preservation Center re-attach loose prints in old albums. Much of the collection was labeled and mounted by Morrison herself in a series of delicate albums, but it also includes many loose prints and negatives. The library also created secure transportation procedures that include a tracking sheet to trace the location of each album as it moves through the preservation, cataloging, and digitizing processes.

All of the images will be digitized by the Harvard College Library Digital Imaging Group and cataloged using the new image cataloging application OLIVIA, as well as the Art & Architecture Thesaurus developed by the Getty Information Institute. OLIVIA will allow cataloging records to be revised or upgraded as new information is learned about individual photographs. Each record will include screen- and thumbnail-sized digital images, and will be publicly accessible through VIA, the new Web-based union catalog of Harvard's visual resources. VIA’s searching capabilities include the ability to search by subject, repository, title, person, organization and place name, materials and techniques, as well as keyword. Master files of each photograph will be stored in the LDI digital repository; original negatives will be preserved and archived under proper conditions.

"This project brings a lot of focus to Harvard’s photographic collections," concludes Lum. "Many of these images have not been available to the public, or even to Harvard faculty, because they are so fragile and very valuable. And they aren’t, in many cases, in a format that can be used for teaching." The Harvard-Yenching Library, which boasts the most extensive holdings on East Asia of any academic library in the United States, counts some 50,000 photographs among its holdings.

For more information on the LDI project or the Internal Challenge Grant Program, contact the Harvard University Library Office for Information Systems at (617) 495-3724 or the LDI Website at http://hul.harvard.edu/ldi.