Thomas Hoepker obituary

The German photographer Thomas Hoepker, who has died aged 88, was celebrated for his humanist approach in capturing the joys and travails of the human condition. Remembered for his iconic 1966 portraits of Muhammad Ali taken over a two-week period in Chicago, he is best known for his controversial image of five young people seemingly relaxing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn as the World Trade Center burns across the East River on 11 September 2001.

Hoepker initially rejected the photograph because he felt it was taken too far from Ground Zero. Years later, when reviewing his work, he realised that the distance of time had imbued the distance within the image with powerful symbolism.

When the photograph was finally published in 2006, Hoepker was challenged by one of its subjects as being taken out of context and without consent. He answered: “As a photojournalist, I do my best not to influence the events I witness. If you started a conversation or asked permission, you would change any authentic situation in an instant.”

This capture chimed with his method: “My photography is all about waiting in the background until everything fits into place and the picture comes together.”

This patient, quiet approach combined with his mastery of exposure, framing and composition, led to memorable and empathetic photo reportage in a career that spanned seven decades. He shot lovers in New York, leprosy sufferers in Ethiopia, children playing by the Wall in East Berlin, and the Maya people of Guatemala.

He wanted not only to record, but to make a difference. He covered natural and man-made catastrophes, always highlighting his subject’s dignity. In 1967 he travelled alone to Bihar in India to report on the famine, flooding and a smallpox epidemic there. The work was harrowing, and Hoepker often struggled with the internal accusation of witness as voyeur. But the camera allowed him to be dispassionate, and to give a voice to those he photographed, calling for a more humane and just world.

When Stern magazine published the images, the feature sparked large charitable donations, and galvanised the German government to act to help. Hoepker said: “Taking good pictures is one thing, but once in a while you have to go beyond and do something meaningful. You have to at least get the feeling that you’ve done more … than just click the shutter.”

He became the first German to become a full member of Magnum Photos in 1989, two decades after turning down an invitation to join from his idol, Elliott Erwitt . He was president of the agency from 2003 to 2007. He received two World Press awards in 1967 and 1977 and was inducted in the Leica Hall of Fame in 2014. Numerous books of his work have been published and his photographs exhibited around the world.

The only child of Wolfgang Höpker, a journalist, and his wife Sigrid (nee von Klösterlein), he was born in Munich. During the second world war, the family’s apartment in Mandlstrasse was bombed, and they were relocated to the small Bavarian town of Albertaich. The turbulence at the end of the war, and his father’s job, meant the family moved often, and Hoepker’s early schooling was fractured.

When he was 14, his grandfather gave him a 9 x 12 glass plate camera and Hoepker was hooked. At Kirchenpauer high school in Hamburg, he sold prints made in the family bathroom, and on graduating bought his first 35mm camera. His father wanted him to get a “real job” so in 1956 he began to study art history and classical archaeology at LMU Munich, and then at the University of Göttingen, all the while pursuing his passion.

His education taught him about composition and what made a striking image, which he put to good effect on trips to Italy in the 1950s. There, he honed his neorealist street photography; his knack for revealing human intimacy produced the superb 1956 image he called Love-birds in Rome. His work led to two prizes in the young photographer category at the Photokina trade fair in Cologne.

He was impatient to get started and left university: “I didn’t study photography, I just did it. The academic world was not my world.” In 1959 he was picked up by Münchner Illustrierte, then he moved to Hamburg to work for Kristall magazine, a decision that would send him to the US, and turbo-charge his career.

When Hoepker was nine, in May 1945, two American GIs, one black and one white, had clambered down from two Sherman tanks that had rolled into Albertaich. The soldiers handed out chocolate bars and chewing gum and let the children see the most beautiful places of their homeland through a 3D View-Master. From then on, young Hoepker was smitten with the idea of the US.

He was not alone: postwar Germany believed that America was the land of milk and honey, and in 1963 the editor of Kristall wanted to see if the hype was justified. He dispatched Hoepker and the writer Rolf Winter on a road trip from New York to the west coast and back again. Inspired by his recent acquisition of Robert Frank ’s book The Americans , Hoepker packed two Leica cameras and a laundry bag full of Tri-X film and set off.

The trip, in a rented Oldsmobile Cutlass, took three months. Hoepker returned home with images of middle America that contradicted Germany’s idealised view of the American dream. His social documentary photography emphasised the disparity in wealth, class and race: rather than the land of opportunity, he witnessed the land of broken dreams.

His work in the US gained him international recognition and, in 1964, he joined Stern magazine as a foreign correspondent, and Magnum Photos began distributing his work. His first exhibition was at the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg the following year.

In 1966 Stern sent him to London to photograph the boxer Muhammad Ali, before his bout against the British heavyweight Brian London at Earl’s Court. Six months later, Hoepker went to Chicago and captured The Greatest in a series of defining images.

In 1973, he made two documentaries on the famine in Ethiopia, which, along with his photographs, sparked a huge aid project in Germany. In 1974, he and his second wife, the journalist Eva Windmöller, moved to East Berlin to continue his chronicles from behind the iron curtain, work he had begun in 1959.

The couple relocated in 1976 to New York, which would be his home for the rest of his life. From there he criss-crossed continents, working for Stern until 1989. In July 2009, he proudly gained US citizenship, while maintaining his German one.

Having been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2017, he wished to embark on one last road trip, to retrace his steps around the US.

The 2020 journey with his third wife, the film-maker Christine Kruchen, was made into a meditative documentary, Dear Memories, which was shown in cinemas in 2022. The accompanying book, The Way It Was, juxtaposed his contemporary colour photographs with the black and white images from 1963.

His first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by Christine, whom he married in 2003, and his son, Fabian, from his first marriage, to Vilma Treue.

• Thomas Martin Renatus Hoepker, photographer, born 10 June 1936; died 10 July 2024