E.O. Hoppé

Emil Otto Hoppe (1878–1972) is considered one of the most important and influential portrait and documentary photographers of the twentieth century. Munich-born and educated in Vienna and Paris, he initially intended to follow his father into the banking profession but became more interested in a career in photography while working for Deutsche Bank in London in the early 1900s. He established his own studio in 1907; co-founded the London Salon of Photography in 1910; and held his first solo exhibition in 1911. The same year produced his famous series of portraits of the dancers of the Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Thereafter, he became much sought-after as a portraitist, photographing many of the century’s leading artists, writers and thinkers – among them Albert Einstein, Vaslav Nijinsky, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot and Rudyard Kipling – as well as world leaders and royalty. Hoppé aimed to create portraits wherein, in his words, ‘character rather than flattery [was] the dominant note’. His photographs appeared in magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair and Tatler; and during his lifetime he published some 28 books of his portraiture, travel and documentary photography including The Book of Fair Women (1922), Taken from life (1922), London Types (1926), Romantic America: Picturesque United States (1928) and Deutsche Arbeit (1930). Commissioned to create a photographic portrait of Australia, he arrived in Sydney in 1930 and spent the next ten months travelling throughout the country and creating a number of now-iconic images, such as a series showing the Sydney Harbour Bridge under construction. He published the results of his visit to Australia in The Fifth Continent (1931). The National Portrait Gallery, London, holds more than 150 of Hoppé’s photographs.