Thomas Höpker

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Thomas Höpker (2009)

Thomas Höpker , English: Thomas Hoepker , (born June 10, 1936 in Munich ) is a German photographer and documentary film director ; he has lived in New York City since 1976 . Höpker became a full member of the Magnum Photos agency in 1989 and was its president from 2003 to 2007.

Life

Höpker made his first experiments with a plate camera at the age of 14 . After his school days, which began in Munich and finally took him to the Abitur at the Hamburg Kirchenpauer Gymnasium via Stuttgart, he studied art history and archeology in Munich and at the University of Göttingen from 1956 to 1959 . During these years he won two prizes in the competition Jugend photographiert at the Photokina , in 1958 he was also involved in the German picture show at this photo fair.

From 1959 Höpker worked regularly for magazines and yearbooks, but also participated in long-term photo projects that publicized the new possibilities of photography and the inclusion of young people and their perspective in the appearance of the medium of photography.

Became known through publications in the magazines twen and Kristall , he was finally hired as a photo reporter by Henri Nannen and Rolf Gillhausen at the illustrated star in 1964.

His photo reports led to all continents; from 1971 he also made films and worked as a cameraman. In 1974 he and his wife, the journalist Eva Windmöller, went to East Berlin for stern , where he was accredited as a photographer . They worked there for three years and gave the West a picture of life in the other part of Germany.

In 1976 he went to New York with his wife , where he continued to work for stern . As art director he was involved in the publisher's attempt to establish an American edition of the newly founded reportage magazine GEO . At the end of the 1980s he was Art Director at stern in Hamburg for two years , but returned to New York in 1989, where he still lives today.

In 1989 Höpker became the first German photographer to become a full member of the internationally renowned agency Magnum Photos . In 1992 he became its Vice President and from 2003 to January 2007 he was its President. He is still professionally active and made documentaries in South America in 2005/2006 for SWR and arte .

His wife Eva Windmöller died in 2002. Today he is married to the filmmaker Christine Kruchen .

Höpker is very fond of the photojournalism course in Hanover. At the Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalism, which takes place every two years, he leads the program as a moderator. Thomas Hoepker also commented on the Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalism: “Who actually invented the legend that photojournalism is dead?” He asked, “ It lives everywhere on the walls - maybe even better than ever. ".

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Höpker's visual language in his photojournalism is shaped by humanism , which is more common today under the term “concerned photography” . Often deployed in the slum areas of the world, he was never interested in the striking display of poverty, war and famine. His distinguishing feature are subtle images without exposing those depicted. For Höpker, as for all Magnum members, photography is also a humane weapon to work for a fairer world. The tension between his activities ranges from reports from a leprosy station to the inhumanity of the recruits' drill, using the example of the USA, to almost ironic images from politics and high society.

In addition, Höpker often photographed memorable portraits of cities on his travels, above all New York, but also Kiel, Vienna and Rome, as well as countries with different landscapes and societies such as Finland, Ireland or the US state New Mexico.

Although Thomas Höpker always saw himself as a commissioned photographer, not a few of his pictures are presented in exhibitions thanks to their artistic quality and dense visual expression. Even after decades, the images retain a lasting quality, despite their production for daily or weekly illustrated magazines from past decades. This underlines the partially timeless validity of many of his recordings and photo reports.

He demonstrates his subtle style with the well-known recording View from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Manhattan, September 11, 2001 to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 in New York. Although he was denied the opportunity to “get close to what was happening” , he was able to create a surreal image of horror. Framed by sunlit cypress trees on the banks of Williamsburg in front of the Manhattan skyline, young people seemingly untouched by the catastrophe chat, while in the background the apparent idyll is radically negated by the column of smoke from the collapsed towers of the World Trade Center . Höpker's picture effectively confronts an apparently carefree ignorance with a catastrophe. In fact, at least by their own account, the people depicted were neither clueless nor carefree at the time of the picture, but instead discussed intensively about the processes, which is not reflected in the snapshot-like photo.

Höpker's great interest today is in the South American continent, to whose countries and people he has devoted his attention in recent years.

items

Quotes

I am not an artist. I am an image maker.

“I'm not an artist. I am a picture manufacturer. "

- Thomas Höpker, 1964

“ There is the term 'concerned photography', meaning the photographer who cares about other people, about problems in the world, about suffering people, who brings compassion into his work. We try to keep that up and with great success. This is still an issue for us: We care about the Third World, about underprivileged people. "

- Thomas Höpker, 2007

Exhibitions (selection)

bibliography

  • Thomas Höpker, Rolf Winter: yatun papa, father of the Indians. Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung, Stuttgart 1963.
  • Thomas Höpker, Eva Windmöller: Life in the GDR. Gruner and Jahr, Hamburg 1976.
  • Thomas Höpker, Günter Kunert : Berlin walls. Pictures from a vanished city. Hanser, Munich, Vienna 1976, ISBN 3-446-12276-1 .
  • Heinz Mack : Expedition into artificial gardens. Hamburg 1977 - (sculptures in extreme landscapes).
  • Thomas Höpker, Rolf Winter: Views: Photos from 1960 to 1985. Edition Braus, Heidelberg 1985, ISBN 3-921524-77-6 .
  • Thomas Höpker, Eva Windmöller: New Yorker: 50 extraordinary photo and text portraits. Ed. Stemmle, Schaffhausen 1987, ISBN 3-7231-0365-0 .
  • Thomas Höpker, Freddy Langer: Land of Enchantment: Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ellert and Richter, Hamburg 1991, ISBN 3-89234-288-1 .
  • Return of the Maya: Guatemala - A Tale of Survival. Stockport 1998.
  • Thomas Höpker, Ulrich Pohlmann: Thomas Höpker 1955-2005. Schirmer + Mosel, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-8296-0219-7 . (Exhibition catalog, 272 p., 195 partly color photo panels, retrospective over fifty years of reportage photography).
  • Thomas Hoepker: GDR Views - Views of a Vanished Country. Hatje / Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern 2011, ISBN 978-3-7757-2813-3 .
  • Günter Kunert: Berlin Kaleidoscope. Records. Photographs by Thomas Hoepker. Verlag Thomas Reche, Neumarkt 2011, ISBN 978-3-929566-97-0 .
  • Thomas Hoepker: New York . teNeues Verlag, Kempen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8327-9712-6 .
about Höpker
  • The great photographers. Thomas Höpker. Christian-Verlag, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-88472-103-8 . (63 p., Only illustrated, partly in color).

Filmography

Television documentaries
  • 1971: Jews in America
  • 1973: The village of Arabati - (Ethiopia)
  • 1998: Death in the maize field. - (Guatemala) - Directors: Christine Kruchen, Thomas Höpker.
  • 2000: Robinson Crusoe Island
  • 2003: Easter Island
  • 2005: Ice-cold splendor - on Patagonia's endangered glaciers. - Direction: Christine Kruchen, Thomas Höpker.
Documentation about Höpker
  • Chronicler with the camera. Thomas Hoepker or the sensation of the everyday. - Production: SWR 1989.
  • Great reporter. (Episode 2). - Production: SWR 1990.
  • Eyewitnesses: Thomas Höpker, Robert Lebeck , Stefan Moses . Script and direction: Thomas Schadt , production: BR , arte .

Web links
Interviews

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Höpker's biography at Magnum
  2. ↑ "We are a strange bunch" , Süddeutsche Zeitung , February 16, 2007, interview
  3. ↑ Lumix Festival: Rush at Thomas Hoepker's lecture ( Memento from January 24, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
  4. ↑ "I Took That 9/11 Photo"
  5. ^ Comment by Walter Sipser on the 9/11 photo
  6. ↑ Thomas Höpker on magnumphotos.com
  7. ↑ "The Magnum Photo Agency takes the most famous photos in the world" ( Memento from January 29, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), ttt - title, thesen, temperamente , January 14, 2007
  8. ^ Kolvenburg cultural center: Eliott Erwitt & Thomas Hoepker . Retrieved November 10, 2017
  9. ^ House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany: Zeitsprung - Photographs by Thomas Hoepker . Retrieved November 10, 2017
  10. ^ Deutsches Historisches Museum: Über Leben - Photographs by Thomas Hoepker and Daniel Biskup. Retrieved November 10, 2017
  11. ↑ Production: arte, broadcast: August 10, 1998, received the media award for development policy .
  12. ^ Table of contents ( Memento from January 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) by Phoenix
  13. ↑ Thomas Schadt was awarded the Adolf Grimme Prize in 1999 for the broadcast on arte .
personal data
SURNAME Höpker, Thomas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hoepker, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German photographer and documentary film director
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich , Bavaria, Germany