Fan Ho (Chinese: 何藩; Jyutping: ho4faan4; 8 October 1931[a][1] – 19 June 2016) was a Chinese photographer, film director, and actor. From 1956, he won over 280 awards from international exhibitions and competitions worldwide for his photography.[2]
Photography career
Fan Ho was born in Shanghai in 1931, and emigrated with his family to Hong Kong in 1949.[3] At the outbreak of war in 1941, Ho's parents were stranded in Macau for several years and Ho was left in the care of a family servant.[4] Ho began photographing at a very young age with a Brownie which his father had left at home, and later with a Rolleiflextwin-lens reflex camera his father gave him at the age of 14.[5][6] Largely self-taught, his photos display a fascination with urban life, explored alleys, slums, markets and streets. Much of his work consists of candid photographs of the street vendors and children only a few years younger than himself.[7] He developed his images in the family bathtub and soon had built up a significant body of work, chronicling Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s as it was becoming a major metropolitan centre. Ho would use the same Rolleiflex K4A throughout his career.[8][9]
... I've always believed that any work of art should stem from genuine feelings and understandings ... I didn't work with any sense of purpose. As an artist, I was only looking to express myself. I did it to share my feelings with the audience. I need to be touched emotionally to come up with meaningful works. When the work resonates with the audience, it's a satisfaction that money can't buy. My purpose is simple: I try not to waste my audience's time. [Laughs]
Upon seeing Ho's work for the first time in 2006, gallery owner Laurence Miller commented that "[they] felt like direct descendants of the Bauhaus, yet they were made in Hong Kong. They were abstract and humanistic at the same time."[11]
"Approaching Shadow" (Chinese: 陰影) was one of Ho's most famous works. He asked a cousin to pose by a wall at Queen's College in Causeway Bay and added a diagonal shadow in the darkroom to symbolize that "her youth will fade away" since "everyone has the same destiny".[6] A print of "Approaching Shadow" sold for a record HK$375,000 in 2015.[5]
During the early 1960s he also produced a series of independent short films, the first of which, Big City Little Man (大都市 小人物; 1963, 30 min), won the "Honor Award Certificate" from the Japan International Film Festival in 1964.[14]
People tell me it seems my photographic works have stories, have some drama. That’s why, later on, I became a film director. Both use images to tell their story, to express the emotions of the author. Photography and filmmaking are like sisters. One is still and one is moving—that is the only difference.
Ho left Shaw Brothers in 1969 to develop his career as a director, making over 20 films with various studios in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He has had three films in the "Official Selection" of the International Film Festivals of Cannes, Berlin and San Francisco; and five of his films have been selected in the "Permanent Collection" of the National Film Archives of Taiwan and Hong Kong.[13] As well as his independent film work he worked in erotic cinema (Category III films), with such films as Adventure in Denmark (1973), The Girl with the Long Hair (1975) and Temptation Summary (1990).
According to Mark Pinsukanjana, director of Modernbook Gallery in San Francisco, CA, his debut feature, Lost (1969), was Ho's favourite. As Pinsukanjana says:
In Lost, one will see the chaotic life of one man in Hong Kong. The film follows him and finds the beauty that surrounds him; he is lost because he never saw it. I think that one can say that this is similar to Fan Ho's photographs in the sense that Hong Kong is crowded, busy and chaotic to many, but for Fan Ho, he was able to convert [what he found] and find beauty."[11]
"Fan Ho : Visual Dialogues" Exhibition at Sotheby's Hong Kong Gallery in 2017
Ho's wife and children emigrated to San Jose, California in 1979 to pursue a university education[9] and he followed in 1995 after retiring from cinema.[5] Restless in retirement, Ho's health began to decline until his family suggested that he pursue photography again. Rather than using modern equipment and taking photographs locally in the San Francisco Bay Area, Ho went through his old negatives from Hong Kong and began showing his portfolio to local galleries.[9]
He exhibited slides of his photographs, some of which were in the permanent collection at SFMOMA, at the 1998 New Asian Cinema Festival, which was screening his 1988 film Carnal Desire at the 4 Star Theater in San Francisco.[15] A chance meeting with Mark Pinsukanjana in 1999 led to Ho being featured at Pinsukanjana's Modernbook Gallery in Palo Alto in 2000, his first solo exhibition since the 1960s,[9] and in 2001,[16] and Ho's films and photographs continued to be shown at festivals hosted at the 4 Star.[17] Ho's daughter credits the first Palo Alto exhibition in 2000 with restoring Ho's confidence and happiness.[9]
Modernbook went on to stage his vintage work at photoLA in January 2006, and upon seeing his photographs of Hong Kong, fellow gallery owner Laurence Miller was moved to acquire 26 prints and put on a solo exhibit for Ho in New York City later that year.[11] Ho would go on to publish a new monograph, Hong Kong Yesterday in 2006 after receiving international attention for this early work.[11] By compositing old negatives, Ho continued to produce new prints of scenes that have now vanished from modern Hong Kong.[7][16] Many of the resulting composited prints were published for the first time in his final monograph A Hong Kong Memoir in 2014,[10] following exhibits of the same title at Modernbook in summer 2011[18] and from December 2014 to January 2015.[19]
He died in San Jose on 19 June 2016 of pneumonia at the age of 84.[20][21] Posthumously, thirty-two photographs taken in 1950s Hong Kong as well as related objects, including his Rolleiflex camera and an early book, Thoughts on Street Photography, were exhibited at Sotheby's Hong Kong gallery in the last half of June 2017.[8][22] A new photo book, Portrait of Hong Kong, was published in June 2017 to coincide with the exhibition.[23] It was prefaced by the filmmaker John Woo.
Portrait of Hong Kong 《念香港人的舊》[24] contains 153 new street photographs which were selected from 500 negatives chosen by Ho before he died in 2016. After his death, his surviving family members spent about a year completing the project, together with support from Sarah Greene (Blue Lotus Gallery) and WE Press (香港人出版). 20 quotable excerpts from Ho's earliest book, Thoughts on Street Photography 《街頭攝影叢談》, were included. These 153 photographs provide not only glimpses of Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s but also recall the indomitable spirit of the people at the time.[23][9][25] This body of realistic street photographs were never highly recognized during the 1950s and 1960s, despite being Ho's favorites,[26] as quoted in Ho's reply to Sarah Greene during one of her visits to Ho in early 2016. The quote appeared in the afterword of his latest monograph:
My realistic street photos are rarely selected. Pictorial aesthetics and images with a sense of humor are still the key for salon photos but I expect changes to happen soon. In the meantime, I will just keep trying.
— Fan Ho, Afterword by Sarah Greene in Portrait of Hong Kong
Ho's family also established a website to celebrate his life and work.[27]
Works by Ho
Short films
Big City Little Man / 大都市 小人物 (1963, 30 min, Hong Kong)
Home Work / 習作之 (1966, 40 min, Hong Kong)
Gulf / 離 : (1966 Banbury England Best Film Award,[13][28] 15 min, Hong Kong)
Ho, Fan (1960). 街頭攝影叢談 [Thoughts on Street Photography]. Taipei: 藝術圖書公司. OCLC40085019.
Ho, Fan (1972). 現代攝影欣賞 [Modern Photography]. Taipei: 藝術. OCLC82284319.
Ho, Fan (1982). 何藩國際大獎攝影全集 [Complete collection of Ho Fan's international award-winning photographic art]. 台北市 (Taipei): 歐語.
Ho, Fan (June 2006). Bennette, John A. (ed.). Hong Kong Yesterday. Palo Alto/San Francisco: Modernbook Editions. ISBN978-0-97788-283-0. Retrieved 5 June 2017. 112 pages
^The year of birth is from the Hong Kong Film Archive online catalog, in other less reliable sources his year of birth is given as 1930, 1931, or 1932.
^"Grey areas: The photographic work of Ho Fan is a stark reminder of old Hong Kong". Post Magazine. South China Morning Post. 7 October 2012. Retrieved 6 June 2017. Having retired from directing, Ho, who turns 82 tomorrow and now lives in California, in the United States, used old negatives to produce the books Hong Kong Yesterday and The Living Theatre, and has put together a series from the books that is being exhibited in Chai Wan.
^"Fan Ho". Modernbook. 3 September 2011. Archived from the original on 5 June 2012. Retrieved 22 May 2012.
^ abc"何藩 / HO Fan". The Ultimate Guide to HK Film Directors. Hong Kong Film Directors' Guild. 2017. Archived from the original on 1 February 2018. Retrieved 12 June 2017.
