Emil Otto Hoppé (1878-1972) was one of the most important fine art and documentary photographers of the modern era.

Beginning amateur photography in 1903, Hoppé was quickly admitted as a member of Britain’s Royal Photographic Society where, over the next several years, he regularly exhibited his work. He was also part of The Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, an organization whose goal was to promote photography as a true fine art.

Hoppé’s early pictures received high-profile awards, and he quickly moved from amateur to a full-time professional and master of studio camera portraiture. His subjects include a Who’s Who of important personalities in the arts, literature, and politics. Among the hundreds of well-known figures he photographed were Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Enrico Caruso, Marion Davies, Henry James, H.G. Wells, Lillian Gish, A.A. Milne, Rudyard Kipling, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Thomas Hardy, Vita Sackville-West, Paul Robeson, Sylvia Pankhurst, Jacob Epstein, Vaslav Nijinsky and the dancers of the Ballets Russes, Benito Mussolini, Queen Mary, King George V, and other royalty, nobility, politicians, artists and activists from around the world.

After mastering both formal studio and modernist street portraits, Hoppé began to travel the globe, for months and then years at a stretch, to capture the character of entire nations and continents as a landscape, travel and cultural documentary photographer. He published a range of popular books of his travels, recording places, people and things that had not been widely seen or appreciated in the West.

Mostly in retirement from major photographic projects after 1947, for the rest of his life Hoppé mined his body of work and his unique travel experiences as a prolific writer for newspapers and magazines.

In 1954, Hoppé sold his extensive inventory of prints and negatives to the Mansell Collection, a London stock photo archive. As a part of the accession of his assets, Hoppé’s images were permanently filed away by subject, not by author. As a result, his amazing body of work was no longer available to be studied properly, and mainstream public awareness of the man who was once the most famous photographer in the world dissipated.

Decades later, in the 1990s, through the efforts of curator and photographer Graham Howe, Hoppé’s work was carefully extracted from the stock photo archive and re-assembled as part of the E. O. Hoppé Estate Collection managed by Curatorial Inc. As a result, Hoppé’s amazing images are finally being restored and made available in high resolution scans and unprecedented quality, mostly from original camera negatives, including many that have never been seen before by the public.

PEOPLE

• Ballets Russes
• Celebrities
• Literary Figures
• The English
• The Irish
• Nudes

PLACES

• Africa
• Australia
• Austria
• Germany
• Great Britain
• India
• Indonesia
• Italy
• Jamaica
• New Zealand
• Romania
• United States of America

THEMES

• The Land
• Age of Industry
• Advertising & Fashion
• Abstractions
• Oddities & Curiosities

• A Life in Pictures: E.O. Hoppé Eras
• Click a Chapter for Details
• 1878-1900 Early Years
• 1901-1906 Amateur Art Photographer
• 1907-1910 Going Professional
• 1911-1918 Fame
• 1919-1922 From Studio to Street
• 1923-1924 Portraits of Nations
• 1925 Portrait of Great Britain
• 1926 Portrait of the United States
• 1928 British and German Industry
• 1929 The Indian Subcontinent
• 1930 Australia, New Zealand & Indonesia
• 1931-1933 Return to Europe
• 1934-1936 A Time of Transitions
• 1937-1939 Before the Storm
• 1940-1945 World War II
• 1946-1972 Writer and Authority
• 1972-present A Legacy of Images

• View Entire Online Archive, Purchase & License Images
• Publications
• Exhibitions
• Ballets Russes Print Portfolio Edition
• Nudes Print Portfolio Edition
• FAQs

• E. O. Hoppé Estate Collection
  c/o Curatorial, Inc.
  Graham Howe, Director
  113 East Union Street
  Pasadena, California 91103 USA
• info [at] eohoppe [dot] com
  T.+1 626 577 9696
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• The E. O. Hoppé Estate Collection is
  managed by Curatorial, Inc.