Look back in wonder

We live in a time when so much is photographed. On Facebook alone, over 300 million photos are uploaded daily. The average smartphone user has over 600 images on their device, yet most know next to nothing about taking a good photo.

With images so devalued, it's a pleasure to look back on a time when taking a photograph was a slower, more thoughtful process. Presented by Asia Society Hong Kong, and conceptualized by the Photographic Heritage Foundation, the exhibition Recovery, Resilience, Resurgence showcases three such periods of Hong Kong history, each documented by a different photographer: the post-1945 recovery (Hedda Morrison), the resilience of the 1950s (Lee Fook Chee), and the resurgence of the 1960s and '70s (Brian Brake).

Arriving in 1946 by steamship from Peking, the German-born Morrison (ne Hammer) sojourned in Hong Kong for six months and produced a precious record of a Hong Kong struggling to heal from the devastating impact of World War II.

"Hedda Morrison produced in a very short space of time a quite amazing range of photographs," notes Edward Stokes, the exhibition's curator, describing it as unique "in the number of places she photographed, the different aspects of Hong Kong she recorded - all done with great sympathy and honesty toward her subjects".