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Remembering Thomas Hoepker
12 July 2024
German photographer Thomas Hoepker has died in Santiago de Chile at the age of 88.
The former president of Magnum Photos, he began his career as a photojournalist, which took him from Europe to Asia, South America and the United States.
Born in Munich, he took his first photographs at 14 when his grandfather gave him a plate camera for his birthday. He studied art, history and archaeology in Göttengen, supported in part by his photographs, which were his real interest. Not inclined to the academic disciplines, he left before graduation in 1960 to work as a photojournalist for Münchner Illustrierte magazine.
'I am not an artist. I am an image maker.'
He continued his career working for the magazine Kristall in 1953 and joined Stern the following year. Magnum began distributing his archive photographs in 1964 as well.
Hoepker and his first wife, Eva Windmöller, lived in East Berlin as Stern correspondents. In 1976 they moved to New York City.
Hoepker served as the director of photography for American Geo from 1978 to 1981, as well as the art director for Stern in Hamburg from 1987 to 1989.
Hoepker remained in New York with his second wife, Christine Kruchen, producing documentary films.
His most famous images were of Mohammed Ali, whom he befriended, and his images documenting Sept. 11.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Hoepker and Christine began going back to his very first black-and-white film negative files and scanning what they found. One of their discoveries was a series of 10,000 negatives showing a photographic study of life in Italy in the late 1950s, his very first images as a photographer. Italia, a selection of these images was published in 2023 by Buchkunst Berlin.
The 2022 film Dear Memories: A Journey with Magnum Photographer Thomas Hoepker chronicled his and his wife's roadtrip across America after his diagnosis with Alzheimer's disease in 2017. He published his final book, The Way It Was, that same year.
"I am not an artist. I am an image maker," he summed up his approach as a documentary photographer.