Galleries
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6 galleriesIn 1937 Hoppé visited the African countries of Rwanda, Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, Cameroon, Ghana, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His documentation in these diverse regions was focused primarily on the daily lives of the native people, their ceremonies and routines, and secondarily on their interaction of the outside world. Hoppé photographed dancing ceremonies, hunting and initiation rituals, landscapes and market scenes, as well as aspects of developing foreign interaction in port cities and government compounds. Hoppé's work exemplifies the mixing of the ancient third world with the modern, developing first world.
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6 galleriesIn the autumn of 1929 Hoppé spent several months touring the Indian Subcontinent to document the diverse geography and material cultures of these countries. Hoppé’s appearance in khakis and a plinth helmet clearly marked him as an outsider but his skill photographing, especially in the highly populated cities, was more than simply a technical achievement. Using mostly small, hand-held cameras, his photographs show unusual sensitivity and insight into the peoples and a spontaneity and distinctly modern approach heretofore absent from most photographs of India. With great sympathy to nuances of these Asian cultures, Hoppé presents the social, cultural and religious fabric of regions that had been unchanged for centuries. He also records the effects of British colonization, providing us with a range of subjects spanning the wide range of India’s social ladder.
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217 imagesBetween 1925 and 1938 Hoppé took frequent trips to Germany. The images he made there are among the most powerful industrial photographs ever made. Deeply affected by the country’s industrial buildup, he created a body of work with unprecedented psychological charge, examining the country’s burgeoning manufacturing base and the people who shaped it. Ever mindful of the militarism inherent in the enterprise and impressed by the sociological implications of working in mechanized landscapes, these pictures convey a broad, philosophical discomfort with the relationship between man and machine.
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6 galleriesHoppé had made regular visits to New York since 1919 and by 1921 he had established a studio on New York's West 57th Street. He mixed with and photographed America’s intellectual and artistic elite including such eminent figures as Albert Einstein, Paul Robeson, N.C. Wyeth, James Montgomery Flagg, Paul Manship, Robert Frost, Anita Loos, Eugene O’Neill, Carl Sandburg, and an aging Oliver Wendell Holmes. In between his portrait sittings he ventured out of the studio to make Cubist inspired views of the city showing it's brave new architecture. Continuing his work on human typology he made street portraits including down-and-outs in New York's Bowery district that can be compared to contemporaneous works by American photographer, Paul Strand. Beginning in late 1925 and throughout most of 1926 Hoppé traveled throughout the United States making photographs for his book Romantic America for German publisher Ernst Wasmuth. Like Walker Evans, who photographed the Eastern and the Southern states of America a decade later, Hoppé looked across the entire country through a similar Modernist lens making well over 2,100 large-format negatives.
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7 galleries
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167 imagesHoppé's photographs of Austria span three decades from 1925 to c1955, years of ubiquitous political turmoil. Austria formed a republic in 1920, fought a civil war in 1934, succumbed to Nazi occupation in 1938, and reinstated a democracy in 1945. Surrounding Austria, Europe was echoing these changes, yet Hoppé managed to find and represent a side of Austria that was almost completely devoid of political imagery; celebrating, like his Viennese mother, the Austrian heritage of the arts and architecture. As well as showing us comfortable, social, and grand lifestyles and environments he also represents the gaiety of vacationing and his regard for manual labor. He combines the obvious beauty of Austria with his eye for composition to produce a group of photographs that transcends simple documentation. These images transform the broken country into one full of spirited and unpretentious people and places. Unaffected by the conflicts surrounding him, Hoppé created a collection of photography that shows a radiant culture, perhaps the true heart of Austria.
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117 imagesHoppé’s interest in Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1909-1929) was predicated on his overall proclivity for ballet as an art form, which he cultivated throughout his life. Hoppé began his work with Diaghilev’s dancers just as he turned to professional photography and in the wake of the company’s first visit to London in the summer of 1911. His affiliation with the Ballets Russes began in earnest after he was designated by Diaghilev to chronicle the company’s London productions. Subsequently, photographing Ballets Russes dancers over a period of more than two decades, Hoppé compiled an impressive visual record of their roles and costumes. This documentation of the Ballets Russes constitutes an integral part of Hoppé’s overall collection and is indeed one of the most fascinating and distinctive records of the famous Russian ballet company.
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368 images
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8 galleriesIn the early 20th century, E.O. Hoppé began one of the most unique photographic documents of London where for over forty years he worked tirelessly to record London’s transition from a 19th century city into a modern metropolis. Systematically chronicling the landmarks and architectural fabric that defined the city of London, Hoppé’s work can be compared both in scale and modernistic approach to Eugene Atget’s photographs of Paris and Bernice Abbott’s of New York.
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236 imagesThe British Machine guides the viewer through industrial sites in Wales, England, and Scotland—from mines, quarries, and chemical factories, to steel mills, factories, and futuristic electrified cityscapes—and demonstrates, as a 1920s news release affirmed, “the poetry of iron and steel.” Hoppé challenged the idea that “with the coming of the machine age beauty has departed from the world,” and instead embraced the aesthetics of industrial architecture. “It will remain,” he wrote, “for later generations to see in proper perspective the glorious combination of art and service for which this present age maybe so justly praised.”
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73 imagesHoppé was, in his own way, a feminist, as his Book of Fair Women (1922) made abundantly clear. To him, the mind was the key to true attractiveness. It was a departure from previous conceptions of beauty, which focused on the shape and balance of physical proportions. For anyone socially aware to produce nudes during this period of profound transition in women’s social values was an inherently charged act. Why, then, did he make them? Certainly there is the reason men have always made pictures of naked women – for the frisson that comes from seeing and transmitting pictures of the opposite sex in flagrante. And yet, while eroticism is an undeniable element of Hoppé’s nudes, they were not designed merely to titillate. Most are frank in their depiction of the female body, and contain little in the way of coy seduction.
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501 imagesHoppé’s strikingly Modernist portraits of society figures and important personalities from the worlds of literature, politics and the arts include George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, A.A. Milne, T.S. Eliot, Margot Fonteyn, Vaslav Nijinsky, Albert Einstein, and members of the royal family. His studio portraits are complemented by Hoppé's sensitive and affectionally humorous depictions of everyday British people ranging from street musicians and stage performers to bus drivers and postmen, all of which reflected the realities of day-to-day life between the wars.
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355 images
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371 images
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24 images