Emil Otto Hoppé (1878-1972) was one of the most important fine art and documentary photographers of the modern era.
Starting his photographic practice in 1903, Hoppé was soon admitted as a member of Britain’s Royal Photographic Society who regularly exhibited his work. He was also part of The Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, an organization whose goal was to promote photography as fine art.
Hoppé’s early photographs regularly received high-profile prizes and he quickly moved to become a master portraitist. His subjects include a Who’s Who of important personalities in the arts, literature, politics and society. Among the many hundreds of prominent figures he photographed were Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Henry James, H.G. Wells, Anna May Wong, A.A. Milne, Rudyard Kipling, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Thomas Hardy, Vita Sackville-West, Vaslav Nijinsky, Anna Pavlova, Margot Fonteyn, Queen Mary, King George V, and other royalty, nobility, politicians, artists and activists from around the world.
After mastering portraiture, Hoppé began to travel the globe, for months and then years at a stretch, to capture the character of nations as he became a landscape, travel and cultural documentary photographer. He published a range of significant books of his travels, recording places, people and still lifes of subject matter that had not been widely seen or appreciated in the West.
In retirement from major photographic projects after 1947, for the rest of his life Hoppé mined his body of photographic work and his unique travel experiences as a prolific writer for newspapers, magazines and books.
In 1954, Hoppé sold his extensive inventory of prints and negatives to the Mansell Collection, a London stock photo agency. Hoppé’s images were permanently filed away by subject, not by author. As a result, his enormous body of work was no longer available to be appreciated fully. Mainstream public awareness of the man who was once the most famous photographer in the world dissipated.
Decades later, through the efforts of curator and photographer Graham Howe, Hoppé’s images were carefully extracted from the stock photo library and re-assembled as part of the E.O. Hoppé Estate Collection managed by Curatorial Inc. As an artist Emil Otto Hoppé is represented by Curatorial Gallery in London, exclusively.
Today Hoppé’s oeuvre is being shared, researched, and celebrated once again through major international gallery and museum exhibitions around the world.
