INDEED, if one should take the time to review events of those 12 months the most significant facts to catch the eye is the number of ships that sank with serious loss of life (March: British frigate Eurydice sunk, 300 lost; May: German battleship Grosser Kurfurst sinks, 284 killed; September: England's Princess Alice sinks, 645 die; and December: French SS Byzantin sinks after collision, 210 killed). Safely back on shore it was a good year for writers, with the births of John Masefield, Upton Sinclair, and Lord Dunsany, amongst others, and the artist Francis Picabia. Also, as the White House installed its first telephone and Edison patented the gramophone, Emil Otto (E.O.) Hoppé was born in Munich.
The remarkable thing about Hoppé is that such an extraordinary life should be so little known outside the world of the photographic historian and photo-cognoscenti. It was a gloriously full life of amazing achievement - not least because Hoppé lived to 94, leaving, when he died in 1972, a vast archive of negatives now managed and exhibited by his estate.
After early study in Vienna and Paris, Hoppé moved to London in 1900 and became essentially 'British' thereafter. Although he had dreamed of becoming an artist - a notion championed by his mother - it was a banking career that brought him to London, ostensibly on his way to Shanghai and another post in finance. He met and fell in love and subsequently stayed in the UK, working for a variety of German Banks and City institutions. His introduction to photography came in 1903, in the person of John Warburg. With a determination that characterises all of Hoppé's life, he set about the art of photography with the purchase of a professional camera, a Goerz-Anschutz, inspired by Warburg's vision of photography as a fine art, controllable by the photographer. An ideal which, coincidentally, matched cultured German opinion as to the aesthetic purity of the artist/amateur snapper.
Only four year later, Hoppé won a Daily Mail newspaper prize of £100 (a huge sum at the time) and decided to turn professional. Again characteristically, he calculated his financial position down to the last penny before appealing to his father to sanction this career change.
From 1907, right up until the outbreak of the Great War, his work in the field of portrait photography was earning him acclaim and rewards and - along with Sir Benjamin Stone - he even represented Great Britain at the International Exhibition of Photography at Dresden, 1909. The virulent and often violent anti-German feeling, which swept the country once the casualty figures dramatically increased after 1914, seemed to have left Hoppé untouched, and his galleries of portraits of the great and the good of English society are a priceless record of Edwardian England in full sail. He has even been described as 'the most famous photographer in the world in the 1920s' by one academic. (1)
Hoppé's portrait work during the war years encompassed an incredible range of what would now be regarded as A-list celebrities - Jacob Epstein, Ellen Terry, Marinetti, Richard Strauss, William Strang, Nijinsky, Leon Bakst, Edward Gordon Craig, Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound, A. A. Milne, Kipling, Conan Doyle, amongst many other luminaries. Post War, his reputation was reinforced by sittings with the British Royal Family and leading politicians in both the UK and USA. Clearly the man enjoyed a degree of personal magnetism and charm to match his skills with a camera. In 1914, at the outbreak of War, he had been contributing to a newly launched art magazine, Colour, and only two years later, when British Vogue appeared for the first time in 1916, Hoppé supplied editorial and society photographs for the early issues.
When he prepared for his great documentary trip to the USA in 1926, a follow up to a 1921 expedition photographing New York topography, it was with a foreigner's eye and a bag of mixed feelings about a nation far removed from the post-War melancholy of a traumatised Europe. The result would be Romantische Amerika, where Hoppé turned an eye fine-tuned amidst the geometric angularity of New York City, out into the multifarious cultural anomalies that make up the most dynamic capitalist nation on Earth.
To a spectator from mittel-europe with its architectural and cultural histories, modernist America would seem both stimulating and, at the same time, megalomaniac. Author, Phillip Prodger, proposes that Hoppé's cultured background and subliminally, the role played by the US in defeating the Kaiser's army, were at odds with the brash and over confident provincialism of a nation strutting unknowingly towards the Great Depression. Subsequently, Hoppé does appear to buy into the easy stereotypes of the various regions and cities of America, and his images tend to reflect the subjects as they saw themselves in the national conscious. At the same time, Hoppé was embracing the zeitgeist and whether consciously or unconsciously, he has been credited with being a precursor of Sheeler and Demuth - and of Edward Hopper. There is certainly a visual relationship between the two former artists' paintings and photographs and Hoppé, not least in Sheeler's own studies of silos, factories and the steel architecture of industry. But one feels that Hoppé had more in common, both intellectually and emotionally, with Hopper than with Demuth and Sheeler's overt celebration of industrial might.
Ironically, it was Arizona that caused Hoppé the most difficulty obtaining a satisfactory shot. Prodger notes that, as an urbanite and with a feel for the dynamic of man versus metropolis, Hoppé found wide open and empty spaces an unexpected challenge and the light quality totally alien to his experience. The contact sheets, Prodger comments, seem to indicate him 'casting around for ideas', trying to orientate himself in front of vast tracts of blank space.
The War had introduced harsh realities into society and the arts. The pleasantries of Art Nouveau and post Impressionism were soon eclipsed in an already cynical Europe, dealt a second deadly blow by an influenza pandemic that destroyed up to 40 million people in less than two years - more than the Great War and the mediaeval Black Death plague before it. A new vision reigned.
1. Bill Jay, former Professor of Photographic History, Arizona State University, in Photographers Photographed (Gibbs M. Smith, Inc. / Peregrine Books. 1983)
Phillip Prodger is the Lisette Model/Joseph G. Blum Fellow in history of photography at the National Gallery of Canada. He received a Ph.D. in history of art from the University of Cambridge, a Master's from Stanford University and a B.A. from Williams College. The author of many articles, he is editor of Impressionist Camera: Pictorial Photography in Europe 1888-1918, and author of Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement. His book Darwin's Camera will be published in 2007.
