Photographer E.O. Hoppé

(Above) In the West Street District, New York City, 1921. Gelatin Silver Print, © E.O. Hoppé Estate at Curatorial Assistance [15423-0015]
Click any image for larger view.

(Above) View from the Delaware Bridge, 1926. Gelatin Silver Print, © E.O. Hoppé Estate at Curatorial Assistance [17369-D]

(Above) Ford Factory, Detroit, Michigan 1926. Gelatin Silver Print, © E.O. Hoppé Estate at Curatorial Assistance [17391-E]

(Above) Snow at Boston Railway Station, Massachusetts 1926. Gelatin Silver Print, © E.O. Hoppé Estate at Curatorial Assistance [17378-0034]
Click any image for larger view.

(Above) New York City Rooftops from the Shelton Hotel, 1925. Gelatin Silver Print, © E.O. Hoppé Estate at Curatorial Assistance [15423-0226]

(Above) Locomotive, Boston Railway Station, Massachusetts 1926. Gelatin Silver Print, © E.O. Hoppé Estate at Curatorial Assistance [17378-0041]

(Above) Rooftops, Apartments, New York City (View from E.O. Hoppé’s studio on West 57th Street) 1921. Gelatin Silver Print, © E.O. Hoppé Estate at Curatorial Assistance [15423-D]


I JUST DISCOVERED THE INCREDIBLE PHOTOGRAPH’S OF E.O. HOPPÉ, a modernist photographer whose work was not seen for 60 years, and only discovered several years ago through the investigative efforts of Graham Howe, a curator of photography in the United States.
I found his work on the incredibly important and rich photography Web site, Luminous Lint. Hoppé’s photographs were first seen at London’s Michael Hoppen Gallery in 2006.

Why is his work important? Why should his work be considered on equal of Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and other pioneers of modernism? Just look at his work and the dates that he was making these prints. I would say, that had Hoppé’s photographic portfolio been known to photography curators even 30 years ago—his work would be in the mainstream photographic history books today. Photographic history books dealing with modernistic photography will, from now on, have to include E.O. Hoppé.

All images here follow the same copyright © as stated in Luminous Lint.

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Emil Otto Hoppé was born in Munich in 1878 but lived in England from 1900 until his death in 1972. As an early and important photo-modernist, his seminal views of the United States in the 1920s rivaled those of his American peers Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, and Walker Evans. Hoppé shows us an America as only an outsider could: brave, new, and grand in scale but with a hint of trouble brewing in the gaps between its multicultural and economic diversities. Hoppé’s skill, intelligence, and photo-modernist vision established him in the 1920s and 30s as a dominate force in photographic art.

The photographer’s reputation was inadvertently eclipsed in 1954 when he sold his work to a London picture library where it was filed by subject and locked away—obscuring it from the public and from photographic historians. Only in 1994, through the research and investigative efforts of Graham Howe, photography curator and director of the traveling exhibitions and art services company Curatorial Assistance in Pasadena, California, has this major photographic collection been reassembled—enabling us to see for the first time in over half a century the work that evidenced Hoppé’s stellar achievement in the photo-modernist era.

Background
In 1907, after winning first prize in a contest sponsored by the London newspaper, the Daily Mail, Hoppé left banking to open a portrait studio in London’s Baron’s Court. His photographs of arts celebrities such as Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, A.A. Milne, T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton, Leon Bakst, Vaslav Nijinsky and the dancers of the Ballets Russes quickly earned him the reputation as the top celebrity photographer in London. In 1913 he expanded his studio to the Kensington house of the late painter Sir John Millais, occupying all thirty-three rooms with his burgeoning operation. For over a decade Hoppé was London’s leading portrait photographer, and in 1919 he began take his camera to all continents of the world—photographing the people and landscapes in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Africa, the United States, Jamaica and the West Indies, Cuba, New Zealand, Australia, India and Ceylon, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaya, and Japan. Hoppé’s large-format gravure-printed photographic books about “Fair Women” (1922), Great Britain (1926), United States (1927), Germany (1930 and 1932), and Australia (1931) were likely to have influenced other important photographers who followed, including Bill Brandt, Cecil Beaton, Walker Evans, and others.

Exhibitions and Publications
In October 2006 an enthusiastic press greeted the first exhibition of Hoppé’s work in over 60 years for Hoppé’s London at London’s Michael Hoppen Gallery. In April 2007 the exhibition E.O. Hoppé’s Amerika opened at Bruce Silverstein Photography accompanied by the publication of a 160-page monograph of the same title by W.W. Norton with an essay by Phillip Prodger.

This was the first U.S. showing of Hoppé’s American photographs in over 80 years.