Hedwig Marie "Hedda" Morrison (; 13 December 1908 – 3 December 1991) was a German photographer who created historically significant documentary images of Beijing, Hong Kong and Sarawak from the 1930s to the 1960s. Biography Born Hedda Hammer in Stuttgart, 13 December 1908 the only sibling of a younger brother Siegfried in a well-to-do middle class family whose father worked for a publishing company. A polio epidemic in 1911–12 affected her stature and gait and a major operation to correct its effects, brought other health problems that were to affect her for life. At age 11 she was given a Box Brownie camera which inspired her resolve to become a photographer. Photographic training After her secondary education at Königin Katherina Stift Gymnasium für Mädchen, Stuttgart, she commenced study in medicine at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, but prevailed on her parents to enrol her (1929–31) at the State Institute for Photography (Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Lichtbildwesen) in Munich, Bavaria's oldest photography school, completing the certificate course and winning third prize in a student competition in 1931. While still a student her uncredited photographs were published in Walter de Sager's Making Pottery, which anticipate her interest in, and documentation of, handcraft construction in S. E. Asia. Hammer was apprenticed during the Great Depression in the commercial studios of the technically exacting Adolf Lazi at Stuttgart 1931–2, though he could not employ her due to the economic strife, so she sought further experience at the Olga Linckelmann Photographische Werkstätte, Hamburg in 1932. Though she was trained in the aesthetics of the New Objectivity of the period which promoted a formalist approach, her inclination was toward documentary ethnography; recording traditional German Volk costume in the setting of their rural environment in forty-four photographic negatives she preserved and catalogued "Trachtenfest, Stuttgart 1931". Her aesthetic, practiced throughout her career is a blending of these disciplines, the pictorial, the designed and the document. China 1933–1946 Not finding the political or economic situation in Germany to her liking, and encouraged by a horoscope advising she should undertake a long voyage, in 1933 Hammer took up a position in China to manage Hartung's Photo Shop, a German-owned commercial photographic studio at 3 Legation Street, in the old diplomatic quarter of the city then known as Beiping. She was in charge of seventeen local photographers and soon learned to speak passable Mandarin Chinese and a smattering of Cantonese, and in