Profile On Thomas Hoepker

Ten years after 9/11 we look back on one of the most infamous images to be taken at the time. Thomas Hoepker's 'Young people relax during attack on the World Trade Center'  has caused controversy being released not in the Magnum's book of 9/11 at the time but five years later in September 2006.The image was released to be shown in one of Hoepker's retrospective exhibitions in Munich to commemorate his fifty years of being a photographer. We look at the impact of this photograph now and the life of Thomas Hoepker, one of Magnum's most commended photographers. While many feel that Hoepker is an artist he himself claims "I am not an artist. I am an image maker". [1]

'Young people relax during their lunch break along the East River while a huge plume of smoke rises from Lower Manhattan after the attack on the World Trade Center.'  

I find looking at this image five years after it's release and ten year after the event of 9/11, this picture has become history and memories of the past. Life goes on and just because a historical event has happen doesn't mean that we sit around and watch or stop. Human life slowly moves on and back to the normal routine. Ten years on we are the group in the foreground moving on with our lives, we are connected to the event, but separated by the blue sea between it that becomes ever wider as time passes it natural course of time.  
However this is not the only photograph taken by Hoepker on the day 'New York, NY, view from Manhattan bridge during aftermath of World Trade Center attacks'

'New York, NY, view from Manhattan bridge towards Brooklyn Bridge and downtown Manhattan during aftermath of World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001'

This photograph tells a very different scene to the peaceful, unknowingly tranquility of the first photograph. Looking at this photograph, it feels like a perfect beautiful day became a spot of destruction and terror. The dark billowing plumes of smoke are the central focus of this image. The normal view of the cityscape becomes lost in the smoke , it is background fading through the smoke. Viewing this image you feel unsure of what will happen is this what is possible to happen elsewhere in the world. The affects that while it may not directly affect you, lingers on the mind for some time. 

Thomas Hoepker was born in Germany 1936. He started taking photographs at sixteen, which he sold to classmates and friends. He worked for a photographer for Munchner Illustrierte and Kristall between the years of 1960 to 1963, photographing from over the world. He joined Stern magazine as a photo-reporter in 1964. 

Some of Hoepker's most famous images have been that of Heavy Weight Champion Muhammad Ali. Hoepker talks about following Ali in a interview with http://blog.leica-camera.com He comments that they were his first photographs for Stern Magazine, where he was working as a staff photographer. He notes that "I first met Muhammad Ali during a world championship fight in London, but I did not confine myself to photograph him boxing. I also photographed him in more private moments, for instance, while he was being measured by a tailor on Savile Row. Our motto back in those days was, “We stay until we are kicked out”. And, as a matter of fact, Muhammad Ali never kicked me out."[2]

An inmate moment between Ali and Belinda Boyd, later his second wife.  

Hoepker has and will be a very noted photographer for time to come. His photographs have a outlasting effect and comment to us, decades after the subject was taken. It seems almost ironic that the 'Young people relax during attack on the World Trade Center' response has become the focus and remembrance of Hoepker's work over five decades. All his other works feel dismissed by this one photograph and people's responses to it. Forgotten is his celebrity photographs of Andy Warhol and Muhammad Ali, which shows us a inmate side to the Heavy Weight Champion's life. His photographs around the world of forgotten and secret worlds; photograph in which a Geshia preparing a tea ceremony in Kyoto. That even though Hoepker has won multiple awards and had multiple exhibitions.His life work is summed up by one 9/11 photograph.  
 

Sources 
[1] http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.PhotographerDetail_VPage&l1=0&pid=2K7O3R13ZX4A&nm=Thomas%20Hoepker
[2] http://blog.leica-camera.com/interviews/thomas-hoepker-heartland/ 

Photo Journalism Part 1

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the godfather of photojournalism. In the early 1930's he begin to move away from his surrealist paintings and into photography; the idea of pouncing on the perfect moment in time. "I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant." His images were about being in the right place, at the right time with perfect capture, in a fraction of a second. He believed that if he waited in to a space for long enough, life will come. He's famously used the Leica Camera which was small little and gave him a anonymity in a crowd and let him get his famous images. He gave himself further anonymity by painting the shiny parts of his Leica camera black. With this camera he could 'trap' real life and create the 'decisive moment'.
"For me, photography with a small camera like the Leica is an instant drawing."

This was the image that started the decisive moment in 1939, Behind the Gare St. Lazare. This photo perdicted what would happen with World War Two for Europe. The Europe was leaping into the unknown. The decisive moment for photojournalism later became from the tragedy of war. The decisive moment was about the right composition and capturing at the right moment.

The Lecia Camera was essential to photojournalism and the decisive moment. Unlike the bulky heavy tripoded cameras. The Lecia was small, lighter and easier to carry around. It was a revolutionary when it was launched in 1925. They had a new style of camera lenses, 50 mm lense.The view finder was on the left at the end, this meant you could view through one eye and the other could view the world. To the right is the Lecia I with the 50mm lense, that Bresson  acquired in Marseilles.


This style of photojournalism has stayed with us. The decisive moment has lead to photographs that shock and lead us in awe. We would not have photographs such as the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby(to the left).

Photojournalism Part 2 War

What makes this photojournalism?

Robert Capa - "The Falling Man" 1936 during Spanish Civil War

                  

Robert Capa, was on the front line as a journalist/photographer. He had taken images from the Spanish Civil War, soon moving on to World War Two. Capa stated that his first two rules of photojournalism, first get close, seconded rule. Get Closer.

A photojournalist partly forgotten by time was Tony Vaccaro. An American G.I, sent out to fight in the war and take photographs of what was happening right on the front line with an gun on his arm. Many of the images he had taken of WW2 were destroyed by the American Government for censorship.

 Capa was the only journalist/photographer to be on the first wave of the D Day landings. He took four rolls of film with him and used all of them, after being sent back to America to Life magazine to be developed. They  rushed developing the negatives and most of the images taken destroyed. Only 11 negatives survived out of the four rolls. 

These two journalist that were part of the war one on the front line with a camera the other with the access to move and leave the front line. After the war these two journalist took two very different paths. Robert Capa went to Hollywood to photograph on sets and the Hollywood Stars. While Tony Vaccaro stayed in Germany to photograph the recovery and change of the country.

War photography and war photojournalism gives a snap shot in time of History. Not always revealing the full truth. There is more then meets the eye with War Photography and with all photographs with out context or words to ground them, we can have a magnitude of meanings and interpretations from one single photograph. Instead of what we are told to believe by the words that ground the photograph. But even these words can mislead what the viewer should truly see in the photograph.

During the Vietnam War Eddie Adams severed as a combat photographer in United States Marine Corps. While covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press he took a photograph that would become his best known photograph. 

'General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon' 1st February 1968

This photograph was taken while there was a television crew as well. However the television clips of the Viet Cong was killed. However the photograph lingered in peoples minds. Was it the fact the none of the soldiers seem bothered what was happening around them. Or was it the fact the prisoner's knowing that he is about to die that stays seared on to our minds?

Adams wrote in Times: 

"The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. ... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?"

The photograph will stay with the viewer. They will be able to reconstruct the image in their mind time and time again. The image sinks in and the viewer has longer to reflect the ideas and truths that the photograph reveals. With this style of instant snapshots, war photojournalism leaves a blazing the image on the viewers mind, sticking with them for years to come. This kind of images can change opinions on war by the shocking images that have and will continue to be taken.