The photographer Thomas Hoepker died on 10 July 2024 surrounded by his family in Santiago de Chile, Chile. Thomas Hoepker was one of the most important photographers of the second half of the 20th century. Many of his photographs, such as his portraits of Muhammad Ali and the pictures taken on 11 September 2001, have become iconic images and have become part of people’s collective memory. His humanist documentaries have shaped the understanding of artistic auteur photography.
Image above : Thomas Hoepker portrait in his studio, Southampton, NY, USA, 2015 ©Ana Druga Buchkunst Berlin Galerie
Hoepker’s subtle images often have a humorous tone without exposing the people depicted: Picture stories that can make us laugh or make us think. In 1989, Hoepker was the first German photographer to become a full member of the internationally renowned Magnum Photos agency. In 1992, he was appointed Vice President; from 2003 to January 2007, he was its President. Thomas Hoepker was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2017. The photographer passed away on 10 July 2024, shortly after his 88th birthday.
Thomas Hoepker was born in Munich in 1936. He began photographing intensively while still at school and started working as a photojournalist in 1959 while still studying art. In 1963, he produced a photo reportage of a road trip through the USA for the magazine Kristall: stories of people’s everyday lives, a visually radical and humanly intense view of a country characterised and torn apart by racial discrimination, mass consumption and spirituality. Thomas Hoepker achieved international recognition with his reportage and moved to Stern magazine, where he brought an often still unknown, new world home to generations with his photographs. Thomas Hoepker was a restless photographer, always on the lookout for the next picture that he knew would find him.
Hoepker travelled to all continents, taking his photographs with his feet. He considered them to be a photographer’s most indispensable tool. He did not accept any borders in the world – as far as possible – and defied them with his own elegance and will. In a divided Germany, he spent decades documenting everyday life and the changes in the lives of people on both sides of the Wall. As early as 1959, one of his first assignments was to visit the former GDR with his camera on its tenth anniversary. In 1974, he moved to East Berlin for three years with his then wife, the journalist Eva Windmöller, for an extensive reportage. Thomas Hoepker was also a chronicler of the Cold War, an auteur photographer whose series spanned a photographic period across history to those who were shaping this history.
Many of his almost countless reportages – from 1971 Thomas Hoepker also worked as a documentary film director – took him to regions of bitter poverty, shaken by wars and crises. Even today, these images and films, such as those of the famine in the Indian state of Bihar in 1967 or the devastating famine in Ethiopia in 1973, trigger deep emotions. Thomas Hoepker said in 1965: “I want to try to provoke with my pictures, without artificially creating sensations and without distorting the truth. But every now and then I want to set something in motion in order to help”. As early as 1962, he photographed the Konibo Indian tribes in the Amazon region of Peru. Shocked by the destruction of the people through disease and hunger, he formulated the question for himself: “Is it permissible to photograph misery, disease and death? How do you manage to watch a child die?” The camera gave him the distance he needed to endure all of this and transform it into emotional images. That same year, he travelled to Ethiopia to photograph lepers living in cemeteries in crumbling graves and holes in the ground. He gives them a face, a dignity. For Thomas Hoepker, photography has always been a way of campaigning for a fairer world; he also saw his work as a mission and a call to change the circumstances he documented.
Thomas Hoepker was honoured with the World Press Photo Award in 1967 and 1976 for his series and was inducted into the Leica Hall of Fame in 2014. Thomas Hoepker formed close friendships with many outstanding personalities, including Muhammad Ali, photographer Elliott Erwitt and musician Wolf Biermann. His adopted home from the end of 1977 was New York, and he repeatedly portrayed the city and its inhabitants. Much of his extensive oeuvre is yet to be discovered.
His pictures are shown in retrospectives all over the world and can be found in all major museums and photographic collections. In 2005, he was honoured with a retrospective travelling exhibition in Germany to mark the 50th anniversary of his photographic work.
His well-known photo books include “The Big Champ – Peperoni Books” and “New York – teNeues”, as well as “Heartland – Peperoni Books”, “Leben in der DDR – ein STERN-Buch”, “The Way it was – Steidl” and “Italia – Buchkunst Berlin”.
Thomas Hoepker’s photographs will help us and future generations to better understand ourselves and our actions as an impact on the world. In Thomas Hoepker, a great humanist with an equally great gift for making pictures has passed away. Thomas Hoepker leaves behind a wife, the filmmaker Christine Kruchen, and a son, Fabian Hoepker.
“I am not an artist. I am a picture maker.”
Thomas Hoepker, 1964
