E.O. Hoppe British, 1878-1972

E. O. Hoppé (1878–1972) presided over one of the most sought-after studios in London and its prestigious clientele formed a remarkable rollcall of the age. In an era when a photographic portrait could make or confirm a reputation, Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Henry James, H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound and the dancers of the Ballets Russes all sat for him. Yet Hoppé was equally a documentarian, and the travel photographs he made between the wars—in America, India, Australia and across Europe—constitute the other, long overlooked half of his career. The coexistence of these two bodies of work is central to understanding his achievement. For four decades after his death, Hoppé was remembered primarily, and sometimes not even correctly, as a society portraitist. The recovery of his documentary work has revealed a considerably more expansive figure.

Born Emil Otto Hoppé in Munich in 1878 and trained initially for a career in banking, he moved to London in 1902 and took up photography the following year. He was soon admitted to the Royal Photographic Society and the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring; an association founded to advance photography as a fine art and opened his own studio in 1907. By the First World War, he had become the most fashionable portraitist in England. His manner was notably direct and unsentimental, distinguished by its clarity and psychological concentration from the soft-focus aesthetic of the Pictorialists who surrounded him.

From the 1920s onward, Hoppé increasingly turned his camera outward. He travelled for extended periods, photographing industrial landscapes, cities, street life and working people across the countries he visited, and publishing the results in a substantial series of books. His photographs are unsentimental yet formally precise, attentive to structure, rhythm and the particularities of place. They position him not simply as a society photographer who travelled, but within the broader history of interwar documentary photography, alongside the photographers who were redefining the medium’s relationship to modern life.

The subsequent eclipse of Hoppé’s reputation was largely the consequence of what happened to his archive. In 1954, he sold it to a commercial picture library, where the photographs were classified by subject rather than by author. Once separated from his name, an image of a mill town became a picture of a mill town; the photographer effectively disappeared behind the filing system. Only in the 1990s did the curator Graham Howe recover the material and reconstitute it as the E. O. Hoppé Estate Collection, now in Pasadena. The reassessment of Hoppé’s career dates from this recovery. Reattributing several thousand photographs and restoring them to their original context was a painstaking process, but it fundamentally altered the picture of his achievement. What has emerged is not simply the celebrated portraitist of his contemporaries, but a photographer whose sustained engagement with travel, industry, landscape and modern life places him among the significant chroniclers of the twentieth century.

Hoppe’s work has appeared at Bruce Silverstein Gallery in Amerika (2007), Early London Photographs (2009) and Discoveries (2010).