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Hoepker was born in Munich, Germany on June 1936. He first began taking pictures when he was 16 and received an old 9x12 glass plate camera from his grandfather, and developed his prints in his family's kitchen and bathroom.
Hoepker studied art history and archaeology from 1956 to 1959 at Göttingen, in Munich, Germany. From 1960 to 1963 he worked as a photographer for Münchner Illustrierte and Kristall, reporting from around the world. Then in 1964 he began working as a photojournalist for Stern, wehre he specialized in reportage and stylish color features. In 1968, Hoepker received the prestigious Kulturpreis of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie. Among many other awards for his work, he received in 1999 from the German Ministry of Foreign Aid an award for his motion film "Death in a Cornfield", a TV serie on Guatemala.
Magnum Photos first began distributing Hoepker's photographs in 1964. In 1989, Hoepker became a full member of Magnum, and served as President from 2003 to 2006.
Hoepker currently lives in New York. He shoots and produces TV documentaries together with his second wife, Christine Kruchen. |
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Muhammad Ali
BIG CHAMP
I got to know Ali at a very interesting moment in his life: he had just converted to Islam and was almost incarcerated because he didn’t want to join the military and go to Vietnam. He was a complex person: a bigmouth on the one hand, and on the other hand a disciplined and hard-working athlete. He was an incredibly funny and spontaneous man, who knew how to market himself.
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Installation View • BABEL SP • 2015 -
DDR Views
Images of East Germany from 1954 to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Photos of children playing along the wall, party rallies, propaganda posters, ramshackle old façades from the Imperial Era and new apartment blocks, images of Sunday outings and empty supermarket display cases, all tell the tale of a distant Germany. -
"In 1950, I was 14 at the time, my grandfather gave me a 9x12 camera. It used glass plates and fascinated me. It was primitive, even for the time, but also very traditional."
Thomas Hoepker
Old woman in a Snowstorm
Hambrug, Germany. 1954
Series: Germany
Archival pigment print on Crane Museo Paper fixed on a 3mm aluminum composite mounting surface Treated trumpet dark wood frame
73.5 x 56 x 7 cm
29 x 22 x 2.75 inches
Edition: 3/20
US$: 5.250,00
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Heartland
An American Road Trip by Thomas Hoepker"There is one moment in my photojornalist career that is still very fresh in my mind. In 1970, my editor at Kristall Magazine came in and said to me and my buddy writer, “Would you like to go to America?” and we, of course, said "Yes". We had never been there. I asked what he wanted us to do and he told us we would be flying to New York, renting a car and driving across the country and back. He didn’t care how long it look. It was totally open. We spent five months shooting and writing. We came back and our photo essays were published over three consecutive issues. The pictures are still quite interesting today. I published them all in a book called Heartland."
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9/11 @ Williamsburg Bridge
It was 9/11 and I crossed the Queensboro Bridge into Queens and then went on down to Brooklyn. On the horizon I saw the horrific cloud of black smoke and didn’t even really understand the weight of what had happened yet. I took some shots and felt like I had failed because I was on the wrong side of the city. The irony was that we had a Magnum meeting the day before, so we had about six or seven Magnum photographers in Manhattan at the time. They got amazing pictures from there and I felt like I hadn’t been close enough to really get the shots I wanted. I felt I was not close enough. Several years later, a curator from Munich came to see me about doing an exhibition. He was looking through my slides and found this picture and wondered why he had never seen it before. I had it published and a big debate arose. Even some of the people in the picture came forward and told me that they were not happy about the picture. It has been discussed, condemned, liked, purchased and it’s probably the second most important photograph I have taken.
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Bibliography
- Jugend in dieser Zeit, Steingrüben, Germany, 1957
- Finnland, Terra Magica, Germany, 1960
- Lebendiges Kiel, Presseamt der Stadt Kiel, Germany, 1963
- Yatun papa. Father of the Indians. Dr. Theodor Binder, Kosmos, Germany, 1963
- Horst Janssen, artist’s portraits, Galerie Brockstedt, Germany, 1967
- Die Iren und ihre Lieder, (The Irish and their songs), Germany, 1974
- Berliner Wände, C. Hanser, Germany, 1976
- Heinz Mack, Expedition in künstliche Gärten. Art in Desert and Ice, Sternbuch, Germany, 1977
- Vienna, Time/Life books, Holland, 1978
- Thomas Höpker (I Grandi Fotografi), Rizzoli, Italy, 1983
- Die New York-Story, GEO Buch, Germany, 1983
- Now! Überdosis New York/ HA Schult., Germany, 1984
- Der Wahn vom Weltreich: Germany’s former Colonies, Sternbuch, Germany, 1984
- Ansichten.Fotos von 1960 bis 1985, Braus, Heidelberg, Germany, 1985
- Leben in der DDR. Life in East Germany, Sternbuch, Germany, 1985
- Amerika: History of the discovery from Florida to Canada, Germany, 1986
- HA Schult, New York ist Berlin, Germany, 1986
- New Yorker: 50 unusual portraits, Stemmle, Schaffhausen, Germany, 1987
- Rome, Hofmann & Campe, Germany, 1988
- HA Schult, Fetisch Auto, Germany, 1989
- Land of Enchantment, New Mexico, Philip-Morris books, Germany, 1991
- Return of the Maya: Guatemala. A Tale of Survival, Henry Holt, USA, 1998.
- Thomas Hoepker, Photographien 1955-2005, Schirmer & Mosel, Germany, 2005.
- Champ, Berlin: Peperoni, 2012.
- Thomas Hoepker, New York, teNeues, Germany, 2013.
- Heartland. Berlin: Peperoni, 2013.
- Wonderlust teNeues; Multilingual edition, 2014.
- Big Champ. Berlin: Peperoni, 2015.
Exhibitions
- Kunst und Gewerbe Museum, Hamburg, Germany, 1965
- Rizzoli Gallery, New York and Rizzoli Gallery, Washington D.C., 1976
- Retrospective, 25 cities in Germany, 1985–1987
- The Maya Kunsthalle Cologne, Cologne, Germany, 1994
- Retrospective, Claus Tebbe Gallery, Cologne, Germany, 1995
- Photographien 1955-2005, Photomuseum, Munich, Germany, 2006
- Heartland, Leica Gallery Prague, Prague, Germany, 2014[10]
- Ali and Beyond, Bildhalle Museum, Zürich, Switzerland, 2015
- Impávido Muhammad Ali, BABEL SP, Brazil 2015
