The story began in Munich, where Hoepker grew up in a middle-class family and enrolled to study archaeology and art history. He had already been photographing since secondary school, with the clumsy enthusiasm one might imagine. Kempe’s verdict changed nothing. In 1954, the first Young Photographer Award was established as part of the photokina trade fair. Hoepker won it in 1956, then again in 1958 — the only person ever to receive it twice. In 1960, he signed his first contract as a photojournalist.
Four years later, he joined Stern as a staff photographer. The magazine was then one of the most influential publications in the Western world, a stage well suited to his ambitions. Hoepker worked there for two decades, traveling across the United States, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The editor-in-chief Henri Nannen — himself trained as an art historian — had developed a habit of greeting him with a touch of irony: “Ah, da kommt unser Künstler!” — ah, here comes our artist. Behind the sarcasm, it was said, lay a form of envy: Hoepker allowed himself weeks in the field where other photographers packed up and left within days.
It was precisely this willingness to stay that gave rise to some of the most celebrated images in the book. In 1966, the editors at Stern gave him a simple assignment: follow Muhammad Ali. “He was 24, had recently converted to Islam and changed his name,” he recalled. “The editors had asked me to ‘stick to the guy and follow him around as long as you can.'” Hoepker followed him across Chicago — through the training gym, under the elevated rail lines, into a South Side bakery where Ali, catching sight of a pretty girl behind the counter, began dancing and improvising rhymes to win her over. It was only years later, going back through his negatives, that Hoepker understood what he had photographed that afternoon: the young woman was Belinda Boyd. She became Ali’s second wife the following year.
In 1981, it was Andy Warhol he encountered at the Factory on Union Square. The scene was entirely in character. “Andy offered a cold hand in greeting and whispered: ‘What do you want me to do?'” he remembered. “Without another word he immediately stood in front of me and stared right through the colored films into the camera.” Warhol — tinted green, red, and blue — looked like his own ghost. Hoepker learned that the pope of pop art was registered with a New York modeling agency and took regular fashion bookings — a piece of information that, coming from Warhol, sounded more like a provocation than a confession.
Between the celebrities and the crises, Hoepker made several trips to East Germany in the mid-1970s. He photographed ordinary life there — military parades, Baltic beaches in summer, the gray apartment blocks of Halle-Neustadt, a soldier kissing a young woman on Alexanderplatz. These images did not denounce. They simply showed people going about their lives, in a country that the border had made largely invisible to the rest of the world. They are among the most valuable testimonies in the book.
In 1989 — the very year the Wall came down — Hoepker became the first German admitted as a full member of Magnum. He went on to serve as the agency’s president from 2003 to 2007. It was late in a career already long underway, and Hoepker himself always preferred humility: in his final interviews, he liked to describe himself as a Bilderfabrikant — a picture maker. Not an artist, a craftsman.
It was this disposition that shaped the demands he placed on his own work. “The earth’s surface has been mined photographically to exhaustion,” he wrote in Stories of Humanity. “The only chance for modern-day reportage is to look deeper, to focus the gaze and describe in minute detail what you see.” He added elsewhere: “I am a quiet, respectful voyeur. An invisibility cape would be the perfect work clothing. Eighty percent of my pictures are simply a product of the moment.” In the 296 pages of Stories of Humanity, there is not a single forced image to be found.
The retrospective spans six decades and six continents. It includes previously unpublished material alongside the images one believes one already knows. The texts were written by Rolf Sachsse, art historian and professor at the academy in Saar, who situated the work within its period with precision. In his final years, Hoepker began speaking publicly about his own memory loss — with the same directness that had always characterized his work. A way of seeing things through, without vanity.
The epilogue was written by Christine Kruchen, filmmaker and Hoepker’s wife. She did not analyze the images; she wrote about the man. It was the right choice to close a book that, across all its continents and decades, always returned to the same starting point: someone looking at someone else, and granting them, for the length of a shutter click, their full attention.
Stories of Humanity by Thomas Hoepker is published by teNeues and available for 100€ / $125.
