[2] Hammer was apprenticed during the Great Depression in the commercial studios of the technically exacting Adolf Lazi at Stuttgart 1931–2,[7][3] though he could not employ her due to the economic strife,[8] so she sought further experience at the Olga Linckelmann Photographische Werkstätte, Hamburg in 1932.
[9] 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".
[3] Not finding the political or economic situation in Germany to her liking, and encouraged by a horoscope advising she should undertake a long voyage,[2] 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.
As a German (the country was an ally of Japan), and unlike other Europeans who were deported, Morrison enjoyed relative freedom and worked from home in Nanchang Street as a freelancer selling albums and single prints of views and of handicrafts to prosperous visiting tourists.
Though the living was precarious, through fellow expatriates, she found work 1938–40 sourcing artefacts for a wealthy British dealer in Chinese arts and crafts, Caroline Frances Bieber in Beiheyan,[12] who collected for the Brooklyn Museum in New York, and thus Morrison was able to continue her excursions through the country into the 1940s.
She married Morrison in 1946 and they left the unrest in China shortly afterwards, first for Hong Kong for six months and then for Sarawak, where Alastair became a government district officer during its turbulent cession to British Crown Colony (1946–61).
Many of her subjects were disappearing as she photographed them; Chinese civilisation under Japanese occupation and before Communism; Hong Kong transitioning from the irreversible impact of WW2 on its traditional cultures; and the vanishing Ibans and their long houses in Sarawak.
And yet the faces peering out at us from the Peking market in the '30s are...human and appealing...'[19] Claire Roberts considers that "through her photographs of architecture, streetscapes, craftsmen, street vendors and customs, Morrison creates her own image of China.
[2] Anne Maxwell considers that Morrison's "two major books relating to her time in China...were aimed at capturing the 'Old Peking' that Westerners enjoyed reminiscing over, and they ignored the changing nature of the city, in...the poverty, civil unrest and social conflict that resulted from the Japanese occupation.
'[3] Graham Johnson in reviewing Hedda Morrison's Hong Kong in Pacific Affairs remarks that "the photographs are magnificent, although generally a little romanticized...a sensitively produced record, interpretation and ethnographic memoir of a Chinese place with global significance at a time that few now remember.
"[22] In 1955, through the Camera Press agency which was handling her work, Edward Steichen saw Morrison's flash-lit photograph of a festive Dayak group in indigenous dress laughing with a young man in a western-style shirt and wearing a watch.