Emil O. Hoppe - Deutsche Arbeit - 1930

VERY BEAUTIFUL, IMPORTANT GERMAN PHOTOBOOK:
Martin Parr, The Photobook, vol 1, page 125

WITH THE EXTREM SCARCE, SPECTACULAR, UNIQUE REVERSIBLE ORIGINAL DUSTJACKET (one side in colour, one side in black and white).

ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL AND OF THE RAREST AND MOST SOUGHT-AFTER DUSTJACKETS WORLDWIDE (extremely hard to find in any condition).

Together with 'Eisen und Stahl' ('Iron and Steel') by Albert Renger-Patzsch, 'Arbeit" by Dr. Paul Wolff and 'Fabrik' by Jakob Tuggener, "Deutsche Arbeit" by E.O. Hoppé, is one of the most important books with industry photography.

According to Bill Jay, 'within a few years, E.O. Hoppé was the undisputed leader of pictorial portraiture in Europe. To say that someone has a "household name" has become a cliché, yet in Hoppé's case the phrase is apt. Rarely in the history of the medium has a photographer been so famous in his own lifetime among the general public. He was as famous as his sitters. It is difficult to think of a prominent name in the fields of politics, art, literature, and the theatre who did not pose for his camera.'

Welcome to the next edition of the SUPER POPULAR BEST-OF-PHOTOBOOKS auctions - by 5Uhr30.com (Ecki Heuser, Cologne, Germany).

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Verlag Ullstein, Berlin, 1930. First edition, first printing.

Original hardback with black paper, original grey cloth spine and with dustjacket. 220 x 275 mm. 128 pages. Photogravure printing. 92 sepia photographs. Photos: Emil O. Hoppe. Foreword by Bruno H Bürgel. Text in German.

Condition:
Book inside excellent, very fresh and very clean with no marks and with no foxing; much fresher than usual (often foxed and with marks). Book outside very fresh and much better than usual; light trace of use only, no remarkable defects. Super rare and fragile dustjacket (of thin paper) still very impressive, but heavily used, with bigger missing parts and with some parts loose (see pictures); handwritten name on the front. Overall good condition.

Great opportunity to purchase one of the most important books with industry photography with the original dustjacket.

"Between 1925 and 1938, photographer E.O. Hoppé traveled the length and breadth of Germany, recording people and places at one of the most tumultuous times in the country's history. He photographed movie stars and captains of industry, workers and peasants, and captured the birth of the Autobahn and UFA film studios in its heyday. He saw the rise of fascism, the creation of vast new suburbs, and the displacement of people from their traditional ways of life. With unprecedented access to the country's world-famous factories and industrial installations, he witnessed Germany as few others could - barreling headlong into the unknown. Moving, insightful, and deeply revealing, the full significance of Hoppé's German work has been unknown until now."
(Steidl, publisher)

"Emil Otto Hoppé was a portrait, travel, and topographic photographer active between 1907 and 1945. Born to a wealthy family in Munich, he moved to London in 1900 to train as a financier, but took up photography and rapidly achieved great success.
He was the only son of a prominent banker, and was educated in the finest schools of Munich, Paris and Vienna. Upon leaving school he served apprenticeships in German banks for ten years, before accepting a position with the Shanghai Banking Corporation. He never arrived in China. The first leg of his journey took him to England where he met an old school friend. Hoppé married his old school friend's sister, Marion Bliersbach, and stayed in London. While working for the Deutsche Bank, he became increasingly enamored with photography, and, in 1907, jettisoned his commercial career and opened a portrait studio.
Although Hoppé was one of the most important photographic artists of his era and highly celebrated in his time, in 1954, at the age of 76, he sold his body of photographic work to a commercial London picture archive, the Mansell Collection. In the collection, the work was filed by subject in with millions of other stock pictures and no longer accessible by author. Almost all of Hoppé's photographic work—that which gained him the reputation as Britain's most influential international photographer between 1907 and 1939—was accidentally obscured from photo-historians and from photo-history itself. It remained in the collection for over thirty years after Hoppé's death, and was not fully accessible to the public until the collection closed down and was acquired by new owners in the United States.
In 1994 photographic art curator Graham Howe retrieved Hoppé's photographic work from the picture library and rejoined it with the Hoppé family archive of photographs and biographical documents. This was the first time since 1954 that the complete E.O. Hoppé Collection was gathered together. Many years were spent in cataloguing, conservation, and research of the recovered work."
(Wikipedia)