And if there can be idealism in industry, there can also be romance—the romance of establishing large undertakings from small beginnings, the romance of adventure and achievement … there can be beauty and attraction even in a factory—the attraction of the power of man’s mind over matter, the attraction of feats of scientific and engineering skill, the attraction of a mighty and smooth-running organization.

E.O. Hoppé in Country Life, April 6th, 1929

Emil Otto Hoppé (born 1878 in Munich, died 1972 in England) was an exciting and mysterious phenomenon. During his lifetime, especially in the 1910s, 20s, 30s and 40s, he was one of the most famous photographers in the world and a highly-respected portrait photographer in London, with a large house and studio in South Kensington (Millais House, which had 27 rooms on four floors and had previously been inhabited by the renowned Victorian painter John Everett Millais) as well as a clientele comprising the most important politicians, businessmen, artists, dancers, poets, writers, philosophers and of course the English nobility, including Queen Mary and King George V. For many years he was a dedicated travel photographer. He travelled across many countries including Great Britain, Germany, Czechoslovakia, the United States, India, Africa, Australia and New Zealand for projects such as the Orbis Terrarum book series for the Berlin-based publishing company Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, and devoted months, often a year or more, of his careful, meticulous attention to each of these countries in order to, as he himself once wrote, eventually select from 5000 negatives 300 images that could together with a text for the respective country, represent the selected topic and be published. “Romantic America", “Picturesque Great Britain: The Architecture and the Landscape", “Romantik der Kleinstadt", “The Fifth Continent" and “Deutsche Arbeit" are the titles of just some of the 20 books he published in his lifetime. 

Amazingly however, neither Hoppé's huge popularity nor his numerous publications seemed to be of any use when it came to his inclusion in the respective photographic histories that were written and published from the 1940s. It was as if fate had struck: Emil Otto Hoppé disappeared for decades and only gradually regained public awareness around ten years ago thanks to the efforts of Graham Howe and Curatorial Assistance.

How could such a dominant, respected and valued figure simply disappear, virtually overlooked by history? Was his photographic art time-bound, i.e. attractive at the time, but with little lasting substance? Was it, so to speak, the salon photography of a particular society and were subsequent generations therefore simply indifferent to it? Or are there other reasons for his disappearance? A key explanation for Hoppé's disappearance is his decision in 1954 at the age of 76 to sell his entire archive to a London picture library. The library inventoried his photographs, as was most common, not under the name of the author, but the subjects that his photographs dealt with. The name Emil Otto Hoppé was, so to say, buried in the library by this form of archiving and inventory. Although his pictures (sorted by topic and location) were still available upon request, this fragmentation meant that it was no longer possible to recognise the opulence, density, size, quality and importance of his work.  

This is a major factor, but can it be the sole decisive reason? Ultimately around 20 books by Hoppé had appeared on the book market and although they were no longer available in bookshops, they were in libraries. There are therefore almost certainly other reasons for the disappearance of his name and significance. A second reason is likely to have been the lack of compatibility, a kind of mismatch between a young photographic historiography and the complex transitory figure of Emil Otto Hoppé. A young, still inexperienced photographic historiography was looking for definite figures and definite approaches that, like decades and movements, could be very clearly separated from one another and individually singled out. The first task in the development of the history of photography was to build as simple a framework as possible and to gain a recognisable, nameable overview of the key movements. The work of Emil Otto Hoppé perhaps simply did not to fit in; instead his diversity and attitude must have been unsettling. On the one hand, he threw quite a modern look on the people, villages, landscapes and especially industries. At the same time he was for long periods wont to print his pictures in more tonal and soft-focus ways. His black-and-white pictures are often characterised by a particularly dense and colourful tonality, while his portraits (and other genres) are often soft and almost a little out-of-focus. He himself describes printing his portraits as follows in his autobiography “Hundred Thousand Exposures: The Success of a Photographer" from 1945: “I use a soft-focus lens in the enlarger. I begin the exposure with the smallest stop considered advisable. During the exposure the iris diaphragm is slowly opened and closed. The effect is calculated by dividing the estimated exposure by the smallest stop used in the process and closing the iris diaphragm for fractions of the period which are approximately 1/5, 1/20, 3/4 (…) The final effect is a roundness which I have not found it possible to obtain by another method." Ultimately he was a highly socially accomplished and successful businessman practising as a photographer. This too does not really fit the image of the twentieth-century artist, which tended to stylise artists and photographers into the bourgeois-romantic notion of a Bohemian with a mixture of poverty, indigence and genius until well into the second half of the century. Unlike the painter Francis Bacon, for example, who later took over the studio in Millais House, and whose very being and work presented a challenging counter-image to bourgeois society's sense of security, E.O. Hoppé created a mirror image of society with his portraits. Unlike too the appallingly sombre photographs of Bill Brandt (another German who over the decades has become an English photographer), which became a reminder of the sooty, dirty black country of English industry. 

In a speech delivered by E.O. Hoppé to the Royal Photography Society in 1946, he addressed some of these issues himself. For example: “The function of the camera here would be to make a simple, straightforward picture, which probably would not be accepted by any Salon of Photography. No tricks of exposure, angle or printing would have a place." [...]  “The search for the most effective angle is the prime task of the photographer, and his success will largely be judged by his success in that search. The harm comes when he does not look for the most effective angle but for the most bizarre and peculiar." [...] “I see no reason to think a man a better artist because he ignores public taste, despises supply and demand and has dirty finger-nails." [...] “Similarly, I cannot agree with the intellectual snobbishness which declares that a man who wears a clean shirt and has a bank account is necessarily a tradesman and cannot be an artist." His line of argument seems to address some reasons why his work was for a long time forgotten vis-à-vis a romantic image of the artist and the search for an approach that could be precisely isolated and named. 

Today we have Graham Howe and Curatorial Assistance in Pasadena, California to thank for the fact that this vast, rich and diverse work has resurfaced and is now being re-evaluated and appreciated. Since the mid-1990s, when his work came into the hands of Curatorial Assistance, it has been rehabilitated step by step; the treasures of this archive have been uncovered and we have gradually begun to see the contours of Hoppé's legacy. We are especially proud to be able to show almost 200 of Hoppé's photographs on the subject of industry for the first time in the MAST photo gallery. “Unveiling a Secret – Industrial Photographs 1912-1937" brings together his industrial photographs from many parts of the world. We are exhibiting photographs from Germany, England, America, Australia and India. While the images in Germany and England are the result of concentrated visual research (commissioned by a publishing company), the ones in the United States, Australia, India and other parts of the world were far more than part of his travel photography - they were created as part of his ambition to show the “real" nature of the respective countries, as he himself said, and not only with regard to historic, architectural and touristic highlights. 

With the book “Deutsche Arbeit. Bilder vom Wiederaufstieg Deutschlands", which was published by Ullstein Verlag in 1930 (the publishing company added a euphoric text by Bruno Bürgel entitled “Hohelied der Arbeit" (“Ode to Labour") that seems rather strange today), Hoppé proved that he was capable of far more than skilful portraits (i.e. ones that both summarise and engage) of London society, artists or Russian ballet dancers or creating virtuoso portraits of countries. In it and in many of his industrial photographs he shows with impressive and haunting effect hydropower plants, coal-fired power plants, mines, coking plants, turbines, and illustrates the refinement of iron into steel with images of iron foundries, blast furnaces, steam hammers and steam forging. Photographs of railways, shipyards, ports and aviation each narrate the overcoming of space, the acceleration of industry by transport. Ultimately he leads us into the assembly halls and documents how the individually cast parts are combined to form complex systems. He repeatedly shows the factory from the outside, as a building, as architecture, embedded in an industrial landscape. 

People also appear in these pictures: the foundryman, the blacksmith, the worker, the unemployed man, but also the bankers who finance industries, in poignant, accomplished portraits or captured at work. They occupy a much less central role, however, than in his previous portrait photography. For long periods the achievements of industry on the one hand and its aesthetic value for the landscape, the abstract appearance of the cranes against a bright sky, on the other, appear, as was typical at the time, to fascinate the travelling photographer more than sociological, political and trade union aspects of the complex known as industry. On his journey to Eastern Europe he wrote the following: “Costumes, manners and customs in the unspoiled country districts, particularly the Ukraine, provided most attractive subjects for my camera, while modern industry and architecture made excellent foils to pictorial landscape work. Indeed, one seemed to be travelling perpetually on the borderlands of the past and the future." On the other hand, he described the urban landscape of Detroit as follows: “Detroit 'the dynamic' with its own river, witnesses daily an endless procession from the argosies of merchandise from the Great Lakes. Like man-made gorges are the long rows of ore-filled barges. In this confederacy of commerce the secret of perpetual motion has surely been found, for on seven days of the week throughout the year, the furnaces never slacken or the tides of workers cease, one battalion succeeding the other in relentless rhythmic regularity. This mechanism serves mankind, but the generating power of this great hive of industry, in the automobile capital of world, lies in the heart of the silent lakes set in the vastnesses of the everlasting hills.”

For Hoppé all the great industrial upheavals and achievements were a mixture of art and science, human achievement and divine gift. His approach, thinking and photography, reflect a deeply existential-romantic, sometimes even spiritual, idea of man and his achievements in the context of pre-existing nature. He wrote: “No man can stand beneath the span of some mighty bridge with its soaring pillars and not feel that inherent something that lifts him above the physical plane, reaching out to immensities veiled from full understanding." These lines read like a summary of his private philosophy. They might come from a futurist, were it not for the deep human, romantic feeling. The enthusiasm for invention, for production, for the future, is coupled with a spiritual feeling for nature and people.

E.O. Hoppé has an unmistakably good, often great, eye and a strong sense of composition in his photography as well as a feel for the existential weight of people and things, and of the new industry for society. His approach is fresh and direct, it seeks the essential in an uncontrived manner, just as he requires it of himself and photography as a whole. In each of his pictures he searches for “sound", a term he himself often uses: he is looking for a depth, a tintinnabulation that combines the appearance of a person, a landscape, a factory, and the essential, the existential: the external and the internal. Emil Otto Hoppé is modern and preserving, simultaneously idealistic and romantic and pragmatic; he is an artist and a businessman with a sense for the practical, for money, for the image and for the existence of people, for the way of the world, the merging of old and new in industry, in the world as a whole and in his paintings. He is a Huguenot, but also a German, an Austrian and an Englishman. This unique blend is, from my point of view, alongside the great visual power of his photographs, what makes Hoppé unique.

The exhibition at MAST centres around approximately 200 industrial photographs by Emil Otto Hoppé. We have also set up a Hoppé darkroom: a large projection room that highlights Hoppé's diversity. In the room are portraits, his nudes, the Russian ballet dancers and his travel photographs from many countries. 

We would like to thank Graham Howe and his team for their fantastic and generous cooperation.