Born: 1878 Munich, Germany
Died: 1972 London, England
Year of Migration to the UK: 1900
Other name/s: Emil Hoppe, E. O. Hoppé
Biography
Photographer Emil Otto Hoppé was born into a wealthy family in Munich, Germany in 1878 and studied in Vienna and Paris, initially following in his father's footsteps in the banking profession. In 1900 he was sent to the Deutsche Bank's London branch and took up photography as a hobby after a friend gave him a camera. The following year he became a member of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) and from 1905 onwards began exhibiting at the RPS annual salon. He was also associated with The Linked Ring Brotherhood alongside fellow members Alvin Langdon Coburn, Henry Peach Robinson, and George Davidson, whose important role in international art photography, established links with continental European and American groups including the Vienna Camera Club and the Photo-Secession, New York; this was succeeded by the London Salon of Photography which he co-founded in 1910. By 1907, Hoppé had left banking behind, establishing his own photographic studio at 10 Margravine Gardens, Baron's Court, in West London. He was naturalised British in 1911, and in February of that year took larger premises at 59 Baker Street, where he photographed the dancers of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes including Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina. Two years later, he set up another studio at 7 Cromwell Place, Kensington (the former home of the painter Sir John Everett Millais), which became a magnet for the rich and famous. By the 1920s Hoppé had established himself as both a famous topographic photographer and a celebrity portraitist, photographing many celebrated Edwardian London celebrities including George Bernard Shaw, Rebecca West, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Rudyard Kipling, as well as some of Europe's most famous artists, politicians and scientists, including Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Benito Mussolini, Albert Einstein and Max Reinhardt. He held his first major US exhibition at the Wanamaker Gallery, New York in 1921 and was invited to photograph Queen Mary, King George VI and other members of the British Royal Family in the same year.
Hoppé's method involved using a narrow depth of field against a neutral background and he pared down his portraits in order to emphasise his sitters' individuality. His personality was energetic and enquiring and he would immerse himself in the subject’s world before taking their portraits, reading their books or going to see their plays, as appropriate. He excised extraneous details, often concentrating on the face and hands of his sitters and using his conversational skills to put them at their ease. In the 1920s he made trips to Australia, Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka), Cuba, Ireland, India, Italy, Jamaica, New Zealand and the West Indies. He also set out on a series of trips across America, photographing people, places and the new industrial sites, commissioned by a German publisher of travel books, the first photographer to make such a complete survey of the United States. In 1926 he held an exhibition of rural England photographs at the Dover Gallery, London, to mark the publication of his book Picturesque Great Britain. His pictures were rich in meaning and revealed him as a pioneering modernist, whose work rivalled that of his contemporaries Paul Strand, Edward Steichen, and Alfred Stieglitz. His travel photographs were published in numerous books, including The Book of Fair Women, which featured international sitters from differing backgrounds and cultures, shattering the outdated view of beauty as a uniquely Western notion. His autobiography One Hundred Thousand Exposures was published in 1945.
Hoppé was also a prolific street photographer and in the 1930s photographed the streets and residents of London. In order to photograph unobtrusively, he would wrap a fixed-focus Brownie in a paper bag with a slit for the lens, enabling him to photograph daily London life with remarkable spontaneity. In 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, Hoppé worked at the Dorian Leigh Photo Agency, through which his work and that of those he represented, including Paul Wolff and Martin Munkacsi, was sold to magazines such as Lilliput, Picture Post and Weekly Illustrated. In 1954 the exhibition A Half Century of Photography was held at Foyles Art Gallery, London, later travelling to the Lenbachhaus Museum, Munich, as well as India and the Far East. In 1968 Hoppé received the Royal Photographic Society Honorary Fellowship; he died in London four years later in 1972, aged 94. His decision in 1954 to sell five decades of his photographic work to a commercial London picture library archive, the Mansell Collection, where they were filed by subject rather than photographer, led to an obscuring of his reputation until the mid-90s, when Graham Howe, the curator of a picture library in Pasadena, California, uncovered them, inspiring a renewed interest in Hoppé's pioneering work. Today Hoppé’s work is in public collections including the National Portrait Gallery and Tate in London, and MoMA.
Related books
- Mick Gidley, 'E. O. Hoppé's Portraiture: the Maker, Patronage, the Public', History of Photography, No. 38, 2014, pp. 56-72
- Brian Stockoe, 'The Exemplary Career of E. O. Hoppé: Photography, Modernism and Modernity', History of Photography, No. 38, 2014, pp. 73-93
- Mick Gidley, 'E. O. Hoppé’s Ambiguous Photographic Autobiographies', Photography & Culture, Vol. 6, November 2013, pp. 279-302
- Mick Gidley, 'Emil Otto Hoppé, Autobiography, and Cultural Moments', in Patricia Di Bello, Colette Wilson and Shamoon Zamir eds., The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012), pp. 52-70
- Marina Vaizey, 'Hoppé: London', The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 153, No. 1298, May 2011, pp. 342-343
- Phillip Prodger, E. O. Hoppé's Amerika: Modernist Photographs From the 1920s (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007)
- Mark Haworth-Booth, Hoppé's London (London: Guiding Light, 2006)
- Sally-Ann Baggott and Brian Stockoe, 'The Success of a Photographer: Culture, Commerce, and Ideology in the Work of E. O. Hoppé', The Oxford Art Journal, No. 26, 2003, pp. 23-46
- Mick Gidley, 'Hoppé's Impure Portraits: Contextualising the American Types', in G. Clarke ed., Portrait in Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), pp. 132-155
- Bill Jay, 'Emil Otto Hoppé', Studies in Visual Communication, No. 11, 1985, pp. 4-10
- Diana P. Daniels, 'One Man's View: E. O. Hoppé and the Diaghilev Ballet', Dance Magazine, No. 28, September 1954, pp. 16-28
- Emil Otto Hoppé, Rural London: in Pictures (London: Odhams, 1954)
- Emil Otto Hoppé, Hundred Thousand Exposures: The Success of a Photographer (London: The Focal Press, 1947)
- Emil Otto Hoppé, The London of George VI (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1937)
- Emil Otto Hoppé, A Camera on Unknown London: Sixty Photographs and Descriptive Notes of Curiosities of London to Be Seen Today (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1936)
- Emil Otto Hoppé, The Image of London (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935)
- Emil Otto Hoppé, London (London: Medici Society, 1932)
- Emil Otto Hoppé, Romantic America: Picturesque United States (New York: B. Westermann Co., 1927)
- Emil Otto Hoppé and Charles F. G. Masterman, Picturesque Great Britain: The Architecture and the Landscape (London: Benn, 1927)
- Emil Otto Hoppé, England (Berlin: Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, 1926)
- Emil Otto Hoppé and Tancred Borenius, Forty London Statues and Public Monuments (London: Methuen & Co., 1926)
- Emil Otto Hoppé, London Types: Taken from Life (London: Methuen and Co., 1926)
- Emil Otto Hoppé, In Gipsy Camp and Royal Palace. Wanderings in Rumania (London: Methuen and Co., 1924)
- Emil Otto Hoppé, The Book of Fair Women (London: Jonathan Cape, 1922)
- Emil Otto Hoppé and Auguste Bert, Studies from the Russian Ballet (London: Fine Art Society, 1913)
Public collections
- British Empire Collection of Photographs, National Archives
- National Media Museum, Bradford, England
- National Portrait Gallery, London, England
- Royal Collection Trust
- Tate
- Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England
Related organisations
- The Linked Ring Brotherhood (associated with)
- Lilliput (contributor)
- Picture Post (contributor)
- Royal Photographic Society (member)
- Weekly Illustrated (member)
Related web links
- Talk given by curator Graham Howe: 'Retrieving Lost History: the E. Hoppé Connections'
- Review of E. Hoppé's exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery
- E. Hoppé Estate Collection
- E. Hoppé's records in the National Archives
- E. Hoppé in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Selected exhibitions
- Hoppé Portraits: Society, Studio and Street, National Portrait Gallery, London (2011)
- Emil Hoppé: London, Michael Hoppen Gallery, London (2006)
- Camera Portraits by E. O. Hoppé, National Portrait Gallery, London (1978)
- Emil Hoppé Retrospective, Kodak Gallery, London (1968)
- A Half Century of Photography, Foyles Art Gallery, London (1954)
- Rural England, Dover Gallery (1926)
- New Camera Work by E.O. Hoppé, Goupil Gallery, London (1922)
- Theatre Exhibition, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (1922)
- Studies from the Russian Ballet, Ryder Gallery, London (1914)
- Modern Camera Portraits by E. O. Hoppé, Goupil Gallery, London (1913)
- Royal Photographic Society, London (1910)
