POST-RETIREMENT CAREER

He exhibited slides of his photographs, some of which were in the permanent collection at SFMOMA, at the 1998 New Asian Cinema Festival, which was screening his 1988 film Carnal Desire at the 4 Star Theater in San Francisco. A chance meeting with Mark Pinsukanjana in 1999 led to Ho being featured at Pinsukanjana's Modernbook Gallery in Palo Alto in 2000, his first solo exhibition since the 1960s,and in 2001, and Ho's films and photographs continued to be shown at festivals hosted at the 4 Star. Ho's daughter credits the first Palo Alto exhibition in 2000 with restoring Ho's confidence and happiness.

Modernbook went on to stage his vintage work at photoLA in January 2006, and upon seeing his photographs of Hong Kong, fellow gallery owner Laurence Miller was moved to acquire 26 prints and put on a solo exhibit for Ho in New York City later that year. Ho would go on to publish a new monograph, Hong Kong Yesterday in 2006 after receiving international attention for this early work. By compositing old negatives, Ho continued to produce new prints of scenes that have now vanished from modern Hong Kong.Many of the resulting composited prints were published for the first time in his final monograph A Hong Kong Memoir in 2014, following exhibits of the same title at Modernbook in summer 2011 and from December 2014 to January 2015.

He died in San Jose on 19 June 2016 of pneumonia at the age of 84. Posthumously, thirty-two photographs taken in 1950s Hong Kong as well as related objects, including his Rolleiflex camera and an early book, Thoughts on Street Photography, were exhibited at Sotheby's Hong Kong gallery in the last half of June 2017. A new monograph, Portrait of Hong Kong, was published in June 2017 to coincide with the exhibition.

Portrait of Hong Kong 《念香港人的舊》 contains 153 new street photographs which were selected from 500 negatives chosen by Ho before he died in 2016. After his death, the surviving family members spent about a year completing the project, together with support from Sarah Greene (Blue Lotus Consultancy) and WE Press (香港人出版). 20 quotable excerpts from Ho's earliest book, Thoughts on Street Photography 《街頭攝影叢談》, were included. These 153 photographs provide not only glimpses of Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s but also recall the indomitable spirit of the people at the time. This body of realistic street photographs were never highly recognized during 1950s and 1960s, despite being Ho's favorites, as quoted in Ho's reply to Sarah Greene during one of her visits to Ho in early 2016. The quote appeared in the afterword of his latest monograph: