Call it selective memory, but there is something dreamlike about the way we recall places we love as they once were. A master at the art of capturing this is Fan Ho, one of Asia’s most accomplished photographers and film directors. Born in Shanghai but raised in Hong Kong from 1949, Ho, now 83, began his career as a teenager, documenting life on the streets of the then British colony in the 1950s and ’60s through the lens of his Rolleiflex camera. It’s images from this period that fill the last installment of his trilogy of photography books about the city, Fan Ho: A Hong Kong Memoir (Modernbook Editions), some previously unpublished, and some created by combining two black-and-white negatives into one image for a result far more about feelings than facts. —Gabrielle Lipton

This article originally appeared in the February/March print issue of DestinAsian magazine (“Mid-Century Memories”)