Hopper & Photography

Edward Hopper has long been one of my favourite artists, and Walker Evans one of my favourite photographers. Both of them had their first show at the Museum of Modern Art in the same year – 1933, and that certainly isn’t simply coincidence. But it may make it rather hard to disentangle their relative influences on our medium.

Apparently there was a show in Essen, Germany in 1992 on Hopper’s influence on photography, but I don’t recall reading about it at the time, though I suspect there is something hidden away in the piles of old photo magazines in my ‘study’, and that and another post on the same blog talk about the Vienna show last winter, Western Motel. Edward Hopper and Contemporary Art, including work by photographers Philip Lorca diCorcia and Jeff Wall and other artists.

A short search on the web also reveals images such as Jack Delano’s 1940 ‘Children in the tenement district, Brockton, Massachusetts’ posted under the heading Paging Edward Hopper: 1940, and posts such as Linda Marion‘s about the 2003 show at the Whitney, ‘Edward Hopper and UrbanĀ  Realism‘ perhaps go a long way toward explaining the coincidences between painting and photography. The Washington Post’s photography columnist, Frank van Riper, also contributed a very readable piece on Hopper when there was a huge Hopper retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2007-8.

But it’s still welcome to see Edwin Hopper & Company by Jeffrey Fraenkel (of the Fraenkel Gallery) with an essay by Robert Adams, and some of the articles related to it in the media, including Edward Hopper’s Influence by Claire O’Neill (on NPR) and The New York Times feature on the show earlier this year at the Fraenkel Gallery – and there is also a related slide show.

And if like me you didn’t make it to San Francisco, you can see a series of installation views of the show on the Fraenkel Gallery site. It all adds up to rather a treat for lovers of Hopper and photography, whatever conclusions you draw about it.

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