In his 1956 photo titled Pattern, for instance, Fan Ho patiently waited for a day labourer to walk in front of a patterned wall before pressing the shutter – snapping the photograph exactly when the man was mid-stride.

Throughout Fan Ho’s photography, he strove for a subjective approach “instead of an objective documentary,” Sarah says. Rather than capturing celebrity starlets or the fast-growing skyscrapers of the time, “he really wanted to capture the soul of Hong Kong in his photographs: the soul of Hong Kong people, their daily lives and what they are about.”

He was immersed in the aspect of storytelling, so much so that many of the artist’s works were perfected in the darkroom. “Cropping was an important part of his work because you start with an image from the streets with a lot of things happening,” Sarah says. “To come to the essence of the image, you need to cut out unnecessary details.”

This is especially evident in the pieces collected by Cathay, which are part of his later bodies of work experimenting with earlier imagery. Mysterious Adventure, a superb example of the influence of Chinese ink painting on the artist, is made up of photographs taken in 1955: a striking black silhouette created by the close-up of a tree branch, resembling the calligraphic flourish of a Chinese character, superimposed later on in 2014. Behind it, we see white space and a small boat with people in the distance.