Thomas Hoepker

Thomas Hoepker was born in Munich in 1936 and grew up during the devastation and reconstruction of postwar Germany. His grandfather, a portrait painter, gave him his first camera when he was a teenager, and by the time he was sixteen he had won first prize in a youth photography competition organised by a German magazine. He studied art history and archaeology at the universities of Göttingen and Munich, but it was the camera rather than the lecture hall that held his attention. By his early twenties he was working as a freelance photojournalist, contributing to Kristall, Stern, and other leading German publications with a visual fluency and narrative instinct that set him apart from his contemporaries.

Hoepker's early assignments took him across the globe, from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the communes of East Germany, from the boxing gyms of Chicago to the American Southwest. He possessed an uncommon ability to compose dynamic, colourful images that were at once visually arresting and journalistically rigorous. Unlike many photojournalists who relied on black and white to confer gravity upon their subjects, Hoepker embraced colour photography from the early 1960s, understanding intuitively that the world's contradictions were often most vividly expressed through its palette. His pictures of Muhammad Ali, made during several encounters between 1961 and 1966, are among the most celebrated portraits of the boxer ever produced — images that capture not only Ali's physical power but his theatrical intelligence and vulnerability.

In 1964, Hoepker joined the Hamburg-based magazine Stern as a staff photographer and later as a photo editor, a role that gave him both the freedom to pursue long-form projects and the editorial authority to shape visual storytelling at one of Europe's most influential publications. His work for Stern ranged from intimate reportage to sweeping cultural surveys, and it was during this period that he produced extended essays on the United States, a country that fascinated and troubled him in equal measure. His photographs of American life — its highways, its spectacles, its extremes of wealth and poverty — combined the outsider's fresh eye with a depth of engagement that came from years of sustained attention.

Hoepker became a full member of Magnum Photos in 1989, joining the cooperative that had been founded by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and others as a bastion of independent photojournalism. He served as the agency's president from 2003 to 2006, a period during which he worked to maintain Magnum's relevance in an era of rapidly changing media economics. His leadership was characterised by a pragmatic idealism: he believed passionately in the importance of long-form photographic storytelling but understood that the institutions supporting it were under enormous pressure.

The single image for which Hoepker became most widely known — and most fiercely debated — was one he almost did not publish. On September 11, 2001, he was driving through Brooklyn when the towers of the World Trade Center were struck. From a waterfront vantage point in Williamsburg, he photographed a group of young people sitting on the promenade, apparently at leisure, with the smoking towers visible across the East River behind them. He withheld the image for several years, troubled by its apparent suggestion of indifference. When it was finally published in 2006, it provoked intense controversy, with some viewers reading it as an indictment of American complacency and others defending the subjects, who argued they had been in a state of shock. The photograph became one of the most discussed images of the twenty-first century, a testament to the irreducible ambiguity of the photographic medium.

Throughout his career, Hoepker published more than a dozen books, including Photographien 1955–2005, a comprehensive retrospective, and The Way It Was: New York in the 1960s, a vivid colour portrait of the city during a decade of transformation. His work is held in major collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Musée de l'Élysée in Lausanne. He received numerous awards, including the Kulturpreis of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie.

Hoepker moved permanently to New York in the 1970s and became an American citizen, though he never lost the outsider's capacity for astonishment at the country's contradictions. He continued to photograph actively into his late eighties, driven by an inexhaustible curiosity and a conviction that the still photograph, for all the competition it faced from moving images and digital media, retained a unique power to arrest time and compel reflection. He died in New York in 2024, leaving behind a body of work that spans six decades and virtually every continent, united by a relentless visual intelligence and a belief in photography as both witness and art.