Biography: City Life photographer Fan Ho

MonoVisions Black & White Photo Contest 2025

Ho Fan (born October 8, 1937) is a Chinese Photographer, Film director and Actor. He has won over 280 awards from international exhibitions and competitions worldwide since 1956 for his photography.

Fan Ho was born in Shanghai in 1937, but immigrated with his family to Hong Kong at an early age. Ho began photographing at a very young age with a Rolleiflex camera his father gave him. Largely self-taught, his photos display a fascination with urban life, explored alleys, slums, markets and streets, depicting the street vendors and children only a few years younger than himself. He developed his images in the family bathtub and soon had built up a significant body of work, chronicling Hong Kong in the 50s and 60s as it was becoming a major metropolitan center.

Ho has been invited by twelve universities in Taiwan and Hong Kong to serve as a Visiting Professor, teaching the art of film-making and photography. He has written five books, one of them containing all his award-winning prints that are on display at the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. The Living Theatre is Ho’s latest book done by MB Editions. Further, Fan Ho is an accomplished and acclaimed Hong Kong film director.

He won the “Best Film Award” in Banbury International Film Festival in England. Three of his films have received the “Official Selection” of the International Film Festivals of Cannes, Berlin, and San Francisco, and five of his films have been selected in the “Permanent Collection” of the National Film Archives of Taiwan and Hong Kong. He has also been elected as “judge” of the Taiwan Golden Horse Film Festival and Hong Kong Oscar Film Award. It is this diverse cultural background that makes Fan Ho’s creative style so unique, full of lyrical beauty, dramatic power, and poetic grandeur.