The British Machine guides the viewer through industrial sites in Wales, England, and Scotland—from mines, quarries, and chemical factories, to steel mills, factories, and futuristic electrified cityscapes—and demonstrates, as a 1920s news release affirmed, “the poetry of iron and steel.” Hoppé challenged the idea that “with the coming of the machine age beauty has departed from the world,” and instead embraced the aesthetics of industrial architecture. “It will remain,” he wrote, “for later generations to see in proper perspective the glorious combination of art and service for which this present age maybe so justly praised.”

Hoppé's photographs of Austria span three decades from 1925 to c1955, years of ubiquitous political turmoil. Austria formed a republic in 1920, fought a civil war in 1934, succumbed to Nazi occupation in 1938, and reinstated a democracy in 1945. Surrounding Austria, Europe was echoing these changes, yet Hoppé managed to find and represent a side of Austria that was almost completely devoid of political imagery; celebrating, like his Viennese mother, the Austrian heritage of the arts and architecture. As well as showing us comfortable, social, and grand lifestyles and environments he also represents the gaiety of vacationing and his regard for manual labor. He combines the obvious beauty of Austria with his eye for composition to produce a group of photographs that transcends simple documentation. These images transform the broken country into one full of spirited and unpretentious people and places. Unaffected by the conflicts surrounding him, Hoppé created a collection of photography that shows a radiant culture, perhaps the true heart of Austria.

Hoppé’s interest in Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1909-1929) was predicated on his overall proclivity for ballet as an art form, which he cultivated throughout his life. Hoppé began his work with Diaghilev’s dancers just as he turned to professional photography and in the wake of the company’s first visit to London in the summer of 1911. His affiliation with the Ballets Russes began in earnest after he was designated by Diaghilev to chronicle the company’s London productions. Subsequently, photographing Ballets Russes dancers over a period of more than two decades, Hoppé compiled an impressive visual record of their roles and costumes. This documentation of the Ballets Russes constitutes an integral part of Hoppé’s overall collection and is indeed one of the most fascinating and distinctive records of the famous Russian ballet company.

Between 1925 and 1938 Hoppé took frequent trips to Germany. The images he made there are among the most powerful industrial photographs ever made. Deeply affected by the country’s industrial buildup, he created a body of work with unprecedented psychological charge, examining the country’s burgeoning manufacturing base and the people who shaped it. Ever mindful of the militarism inherent in the enterprise and impressed by the sociological implications of working in mechanized landscapes, these pictures convey a broad, philosophical discomfort with the relationship between man and machine.

Hoppé was, in his own way, a feminist, as his Book of Fair Women (1922) made abundantly clear. To him, the mind was the key to true attractiveness. It was a departure from previous conceptions of beauty, which focused on the shape and balance of physical proportions. For anyone socially aware to produce nudes during this period of profound transition in women’s social values was an inherently charged act. Why, then, did he make them? Certainly there is the reason men have always made pictures of naked women – for the frisson that comes from seeing and transmitting pictures of the opposite sex in flagrante. And yet, while eroticism is an undeniable element of Hoppé’s nudes, they were not designed merely to titillate. Most are frank in their depiction of the female body, and contain little in the way of coy seduction.