The Exemplary Career of E. O. Hoppé: Photography, Modernism and Modernity

Abstract

This article critically examines the landscape and cityscape photography of E. O. Hoppé. In Picturesque Great Britain (1926), Hoppé presented a vision of the nation refracted through the prism of an older Pictorialist aesthetic, whereas his later works, Romantic America (1927) and Deutsche Arbeit (1930), offered a more enthusiastic interpretation of the urban industrial world. Indeed, the latter volume is very much in the style of Die Neue Sachlichkeit. Hoppé’s photography is, therefore, characterised by a high level of visual mutability as he shifted styles to suit publication needs, and he appears a particularly adept commercial opportunist. Elsewhere, Hoppé’s work appeared simultaneously in contexts that rejected the technological utopianism of the New Objectivity and Amerikanismus. In Germany, American Zivilisation was often understood to be a threat to a more traditional Kultur, and Hoppé’s work was also published in contexts characterised by a reactionary modernism that aimed at a reconciliation of the old with the new. This article analyses the cultural, commercial and ideological forces that helped shape Hoppé’s work in Britain, Germany and the United States.