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The Chronicler: Past Master!

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Photographer, writer and curator Ed Stokes sits down with Elizabeth Kerr to discuss his upcoming exhibition, and wind the camera back on the city he’s called home for a half-century

It’s a sunny afternoon in late October, and it seems autumn has officially begun. Ed Stokes glides into the Hong Kong Maritime Museum Café 8 like any good photographer: with a wheelie case in tow. But Ed isn’t toting camera gear today. “Which is a regret, but it’s simply because the books of what I call heritage photography and other research are very time intensive,” he opens. “Doing the books and the exhibitions is a full-time job. But I would love to pick up a camera again.”

Ed is lingering at the museum putting the finishing touches on one of those time-consuming exhibitions. Voyage Through Time: Hong Kong Maritime Photographs, 1940s – 1970s opens November 13 (running through February) and chronicles the profound changes Hong Kong underwent between the challenging post-war years and the pre-1980s economic boom. With roughly 70 on-and-off years in the city, much of that photographing it, Ed’s uniquely qualified for the job.

Born in Adelaide, Ed relocated to Hong Kong in – hold onto your hats – 1953 with his family. His father, an Australian navy man stationed to the HMAS Australia during the Pacific War, served at Guadalcanal, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines, and when the Australia went home for refitting in 1945, the elder Stokes wound up on a British frigate headed for Hong Kong. He fell in love with the city and moved the family, eventually going into education and becoming headmaster at Queen’s College. The family lived in Repulse Bay, in government quarters, and after putting down real roots stayed well past Stokes the principal’s retirement. “It was the most interesting part of the family experience and I really do believe it was fate. It certainly impacted my work,” Ed says.

That’s an understatement. Ed, a lifelong bachelor, has spent over half his life in Hong Kong, between stints in Australia, in the UK to attend Oxford, which led to eight years of teaching, and in Singapore. Initially, he planned to follow his father into the navy but realised, after three years as a cadet, that it wasn’t for him. On leaving the navy, he returned to Hong Kong before beginning university, but misalignment between academic years resulted in a cub reporter gig at the SCMP. It was 1967, the romantic time of newsrooms filled with cigarette smoke and the clack of Remington typewriters, and Ed got bitten by the writing bug, which sat well with the love of photography he’d picked up on one of his many trips between Asia and England.

“Back then, the journey overland was through all these countries you can’t just cross now – Iran, Iraq,” Ed recalls. “It was a fascinating time. In India I was really captured by the colour, the diversity and the intensity. I decided I wanted to be a photographer.” Ask Ed if he considers himself a writer or a photographer and he wisely cops out by saying “both,” referring to himself as a visual storyteller, heavily influenced by author and oral historian Studs Terkel, best known for chronicling American life from the Great Depression to the early 21st century.

“Terkel was my great inspiration for his ability to reach out to all different strata of society, to communicate with people and draw out their stories.”

VISUAL STORYTELLING

Ed started a photography career in earnest by chronicling life in an Outback mining town, as well as Australia’s natural landscape; the final piece of the puzzle coming when he developed a keen interest in bringing history to life. That would ultimately lead him down the path of photo historian and curator – and back to Hong Kong; to Lamma.

As an autodidact, Ed developed his aesthetic little by little, reading technical manuals of course, but also immersing himself in other photographers, among them indirect mentors like W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, and noted Hong Kong chroniclers Brian Brake and Hedda Morrison. Ed himself wasn’t big on photojournalism, mostly because he was less than enamoured with “barging into people’s lives,” as he puts it.

He hit his stride when he started capturing Hong Kong’s natural environment in books such as Hong Kong’s Wild Places, Exploring Landscape Photography and Across Hong Kong Island (check him out at www.edwardstokes.com). Working in 35mm allowed Ed to pack his camping and photo gear and spend days in the wild, a less frequent occurrence once he transitioned to large format. But he still managed to catch the city at its most unguarded.

One of the things Ed loves about Lantau – he’s lived in DB for 10 years – is the proximity to nature. “When I was doing Wild Places, I was camping out, taking photos overnight. I went down to a very small stream to slosh some water onto my face, to wake myself up, and I sensed some presence. I looked up and there was a barking deer just staring at me. Unbelievable,” he says.

Looking back, Ed recalls a kind of anti-DB movement, when all he heard was, ‘Who could ever live there?’ But he’s found it to his liking. “It’s this mixed community, with all ages. I really, really like that. In my building, you’ve got families, babies, younger kids, teenagers, older folks, elderly people. Like Lamma there are no cars, but unlike Lamma there are lots of day-to-day facilities.”

VOYAGE THROUGH TIME

From his position as curator at his own Hong Kong Photo Heritage Programme (now an archive), Ed’s Voyage Through Time (sponsored by The Robert HN Ho Family Foundation HK and The Swire Group Charitable Trust) is a free exhibition of roughly 60 photographs by Hedda Morrison, Brian Brake and Stokes himself, shot between the 1940s and 1970s. In some ways, the exhibition is a continuation of 2021’s Recovery, Resilience, Resurgence, which included the work of local shooter Lee Fook-chee. “That was very successful, and had been partly inspired by a desire to say yes Hong Kong has had problems, political issues, COVID and so on, but Hong Kong has always had problems that it transcended,” Ed explains of the new collection’s genesis, this time with a maritime angle, hence its venue.

The images in Voyage Through Time portray Hong Kong’s harbour, its shipping and people, and they reveal the dedication of three very different photographers each determined to bear witness and create a record of a specific point in time – bestowing a rich legacy. As an added bonus, all the photographs in the exhibition are from film negatives, a medium quickly becoming specialised in the wake of the ubiquity of digital imaging, which to Ed’s mind can’t hold a candle to silver halide.

“One of the things about all the work I’ve done in heritage photography is telling, retelling, recreating and bringing back to life the story of those photographers,” he says. “That’s quite important to me; talking about their stories. Who were they? How did they work? What did they like? Because that’s really far more important than taking good photos, from any camera. The exhibition is telling the stories of people, of their humanity.

“Digital is incredibly useful,” Ed concludes. “But I would always say to any younger person wanting to become a photographer, ‘Go and work with film. You become more selective and considered.’ And film has a beauty that digital doesn’t have.”

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