E. O. Hoppe
Carting apples,
Cygnet, Tasmania,
1930
Courtesy of E.O. Hoppe Galleries
Published in The Fifth Continent 1931
E. O. Hoppe The Fifth Continent 1931
REVIEW
The photographs of E.O. Hoppe are as sophisticated today as they were in his heyday, writes Sebastian Smee
February 02, 2008
Source: The Australian online
E.O. Hoppe’s Australia
By Graham Howe and Erika Esau
W.W. Norton, $54.95
IN art, you occasionally hear of someone now obscure who was world-famous during his or her lifetime. It’s the inevitable reverse, I suppose, of that withered cliche, the misunderstood genius: the artist who has to wait for death before achieving immortal fame.
What’s often entertaining about the first category, the one-time star now long-forgotten, is what it reveals about prevailing tastes in earlier eras. Victorian-era painter G.F. Watts, for instance, was probably the most famous painter alive in the years leading up to his death in 1904. But today Watts’s weird blend of symbolism, naturalism and allegory looks so corny and confused it can put your teeth on edge.
The German-born British photographer, E.O. Hoppe, was a different sort of a case. It’s true, he was probably the most famous photographer alive in the 1920s, and it’s true that after his death he fell into obscurity.
But here’s the marvel: Hoppe’s photographs look as brilliant now as they did to his contemporaries. Looking at his pictures, you see it immediately; it doesn’t take a specialist’s eye or any kind of rarefied knowledge.
So why was he forgotten?
Since receiving two stunning new books on Hoppe I have been trying to find out. Usually in such cases, complex, often intangible currents of taste turn out to have been at play, affecting the reception of the artist at various critical moments. In Hoppe’s case, there may have been a few such factors at play.
But the main reason for his fall into obscurity appears so ludicrous it is hard to credit. Apparently, in 1967 Hoppe sold his archive — 40 years’ worth of photographs — to a picture library in London. There, the images were filed by subject along with millions of other stock pictures, so that they were no longer accessible by author. The result of this dubious but relatively mundane filing decision was that, as Hoppe’s celebrity waned and other stars of photography rose to prominence, he came to be overlooked by all but a few scholars and curators.
The best part about rediscovering Hoppe, as far as Australian audiences are concerned, is that he came out to this continent in 1930, staying nine months, crisscrossing the country at an astonishing clip and making more than 3300 photographs. One-hundred-and-sixty of these made it into a photographic travel book called The Fifth Continent.
It was the first such book to present a comprehensive picture of Australia, and the images in it were so good it’s hard to believe that it ever went out of print. But it did, as most books do, and the rest of the photographs disappeared into that dusty London archive.
Only recently have the Australian photographs been reassembled and published in a handsome book called E.O. Hoppe’s Australia. Seen together, they amount to an extraordinary portrait of Australia in that momentous year, which saw, among other things, the Great Depression take hold and the two spans of the Sydney Harbour Bridge ceremoniously joined.
E.O. Hoppe’s Australia is the second in a projected series of four books highlighting aspects of Hoppe’s oeuvre. The first, E.O Hoppe’s Amerika: Modernist Photographs from the 1920s, focuses on a slightly earlier body of work. Hoppe, who was born in Munich in 1878 and moved to London in 1900, had travelled to America after achieving fame as a cosmopolitan society portraitist and ballet photographer in London. He became interested in photojournalism towards the end of World War I, and was handed a helpful scoop when he happened to be the only photographer at the scene when a hot-air balloon exploded.
In the early 1920s, along with small clusters of photographers scattered across Europe, Russia and America, he discovered the aesthetic potential of industrial machines and architecture. These subjects, which he made hauntingly beautiful, became the focus of his work in America and Germany throughout the ’20s.
The American photographs were originally published in a book called Romantic America. The first book to use a survey approach to capture an entire country, it was an important precedent for similar projects by the likes of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank. The images in it reveal, among other things, the ease with which Hoppe straddled the then diverging styles of soft-focus pictorialism and emergent modernism.
Perhaps this flexibility explains why not all the modernist photographers in the US adored him. Despite Hoppe’s fame and indisputable modernist credentials, Alfred Stieglitz omitted him from Camera Work, the magazine that spread the modernist credo of Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession group around the globe.
Art historian Phillip Prodger, in the new volume of Hoppe’s American work, suggests rivalry was to blame. Certainly Stieglitz was more puritanical about modernism than Hoppe, who seems to have been relaxed about his working philosophy, emphasising individuality and a whatever-works attitude over and above any aesthetic program.
But as Prodger concludes: “To the victor go the spoils.” Stieglitz and his cohort made it into the history books as the fathers of modernist photography. But ironically, Prodger says, “the wonderful inventiveness of their photography was anticipated and in some cases possibly inspired by a figure whose name has now fallen partially into obscurity”.
By the time Hoppe arrived in Australia, at any rate, his fame was at its height. An exhibition of his work was held at David Jones’s main store gallery in Sydney, timed to coincide with his arrival there. Hailed in the press, it would almost certainly have been seen by Australia’s own band of incipient modernists, including Harold Cazneaux, Wolfgang Sievers and Max Dupain.
Hoppe had arrived from Britain via Ceylon and India. He landed in Perth in January 1930, accompanied by his 18-year-old son Frank, who acted as his assistant, camera-hauler and secretary. Six days later they were in Melbourne, from where they sailed to New Zealand.
Sydney was next, then back to Melbourne; thence to Tasmania and on to Perth again via Adelaide; then Central Australia, Darwin and Queensland. The pace was relentless and the itinerary so hectic that almost eight decades later it is impossible to be sure where precisely Hoppe went and in what order. What is not in doubt is the quality of the images, which range from landscapes and cityscapes to images of industry and portraits of what Hoppe, like his German compatriot August Sander, thought of as types.
Included were images of Aborigines at locations such as Palm Island and Hermannsburg. These, despite evidence that Hoppe bought into widespread romantic assumptions about the noble savage, are among the most compelling images in the book.
Like all great photographs, the best of them provide just enough to hook our imaginations, then leave us dangling in a world of unknowns. The portrait of a smiling Aboriginal woman in a camp, for instance, shows enough of her overcoat to reveal that it is cold. Her hands are stuffed in the pockets; one button has been replaced with a large safety pin and she wears a headscarf. But there is no pathos in the photograph. Instead, the woman greets the camera with the warmest and most unguarded of smiles.
In the capital cities, Hoppe contrived images of serendipitous street life that anticipate the photography of Lee Friedlander or the photographic transfers of Robert Rauschenberg: Venus on a Truck, for instance, shows a reproduction Venus di Milo on the back of a rugged-looking truck on an Adelaide street, the surreal ensemble fetchingly framed by two plane trees.
Other images anticipate Dupain’s classically inspired photographs of heroic beach lifesavers, none more so than Pearling Look-out Man, Thursday Island. The square-jawed man in question is shown from the side and slightly below, emphasising his elevation. He has one muscular arm stretched out on the boat’s boom while the other is held up to shade his eyes from the sun. One strap of his singlet is missing, creating a slightly cheeky suggestion of a Greek or Roman toga, and the background is whited-out. Only the hand and rope at the extreme upper right of the image are out of focus, enhancing the iconic, almost sculptural clarity of the image.
Crisply distilled modernist concoctions such as this seem less beguiling to me than Hoppe’s slightly busier photographs. If modernist photography can soon become tiresome, it’s because all the formal sophistication and radical reductiveness can come at the expense of human interest; and human interest (setting aside the hideousness of the term) is what photography, when all is said and done, does best.
None of this is a problem for Hoppe, who never let a neat symmetry, far less an abstract idea, get in the way of a compelling or beautiful subject. “I am indifferent to academic discussion whether photography is an art or craft,” he once said. For him, there was no difference: you used your skill to make something artistic; simple.
Sometimes, it’s true, Hoppe can seem slick, as if it were all just a little too easy for him. His portraits are occasionally a little too beautifully lit and more than once he surrenders his good eye to a facile journalistic cliche: the three Aboriginal women in mission clothes gazing inscrutably at a film poster emblazoned with the word Paris, for instance.
But it’s incredible to me how few of the images are marred by this kind of winking intrusiveness. Again and again, Hoppe shows himself to have just the right combination of acute sensitivity and emotional restraint.
There are some images in E.O. Hoppe’s Australia — the slightly blurry close-up of the multiracial girl half-smiling as she bites her lip; the dark yarra trees standing mutely against a light grey, billowing sky; the Aboriginal children playing against an endless line of white nightshirts hung out to dry at the New Norcia mission — that are so freighted with suggestion, so congested with unknowns, that your mind can’t quite put them down.
No wonder Cecil Beaton, introducing Hoppe’s autobiography, called him simply “The Master”.
[end of review].
