Fan Ho Interview: On the ‘Decisive Moment’

While much of the Hong Kong of the 1950s and 1960s captured by Fan Ho no longer exists, it can still be experienced through his photographs of the time. Said Fan Ho: ‘Photographing in black and white offers me a sense of distance: a distance from real life. I think this kind of distance is important.’ 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 the age of fourteen. He moved to Hong Kong in 1949, and from the 1950s onwards gained considerable attention for his striking photographs of everyday life in Hong Kong. M has twenty-eight seminal photographs by Fan Ho in our collections, providing a unique window into the past. Read more about Fan Ho on the M Magazine: The English-language version of this text has been updated to reflect the artist’s name as Fan Ho, instead of Ho Fan, at the request of the artist’s est