“E.O. Hoppé uniquely spanned two crucial eras in twentieth-century
history and photography: the Edwardian and the Modern.”

— Colin Westerbeck
Director, California Museum of Photography, Riverside

E.O. Hoppé was one of the most renowned portrait photographers of his day, as well as a brilliant landscape and travel photographer. His strikingly modernist portraits describe a virtual Who’s Who of important personalities in the arts, literature, and politics in Great Britain and the US between the wars. Among the hundreds of well-known figures he photographed were George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, A.A. Milne, T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton, Leon Bakst, Vaslav Nijinsky and the dancers of the Ballets Russes, and Queen Mary, King George, and members of the Royal Family.

The prototypical celebrity photographer, his popularity at the time can only be compared to that of celebrity photographers of the late twentieth century like Richard Avedon or Irving Penn. In 1945 Cecil Beaton wrote an introduction to Hoppé's autobiography, One Hundred Thousand Exposures, and called him simply “The Master.” And yet, until well after his death at 94 in 1972, E.O. Hoppé’s extraordinary photographic achievement was primarily known and understood by a handful of museum curators, collectors, and scholars of photography. Only recently has his place in the history of photography begun to be fully appreciated, and, with this recognition, a renaissance of interest in his art has finally commenced.

“There seems to be a general consensus among historians of photo-
graphy that nothing important happened in British photography
between, approximately, 1910 and 1930. In my view, the career of
E.O. Hoppé proves that idea to be wrong.”

— Mark Haworth-Booth
Visiting Professor of Photography, University of the Arts, London
Honorary Research Fellow, Victoria and Albert Museum

How is it possible that a photographer so famous in the early modern period and so prolific between 1907 and 1939 came to be known only in a limited way to a few photo-cognoscenti? The art journals of the 1920s in Britain, Europe, and the US paid far more attention to Hoppé’s exhibitions and publications than they did those of Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Steichen, Paul Outerbridge, Edward Weston, or others to whom historians point as founders of modernist photography.

The answer would seem to be one of those accidents of fate that obscured Hoppé's work for the next half century. In 1954, at age 76, E.O. Hoppé sold his photographic work of the previous forty-seven years to a London picture library where, filed by subject with millions of other “stock” pictures, the photographs were no longer accessible by author. Most all of Hoppé's photographic work—that which gained him the reputation as one of Britain's most influential photographers between 1907 and 1939—was literally entombed.

By the 1970s, when photographic history first began to be researched and written in depth, Hoppé had been forgotten. And yet the act that obscured Hoppé's archives was also that which kept most all of his work intact.

After its retrieval in 1994, Hoppé's photographic collection was reunited with his letters and biographical documents from the Hoppé family. With extensive organization, conservation, and reassembly, the photographs of E.O. Hoppé are now accessible for the first time since 1954.

A major monographic series dedicated to returning Hoppé's work to pubic view is now in production:

E.O. Hoppé's Amerika: Modernist Photographs from the 1920s (W.W. Norton, 2007)
E.O. Hoppé's Australia (W.W. Norton, 2007)

These will be followed in 2009 by:
E.O. Hoppé: Diaghilev's Russian Ballet
E.O. Hoppé: The German Photographs, 1925–1938
E.O. Hoppé: The English
E.O. Hoppé: Indian Subcontinent of the Cusp of Change
E.O. Hoppé: The British Machine, Photographs of Industrial Britain Between the Wars