European consumer magazines after the second world war were always fascinated by everyday life in America. European austerity continued while the country on the other side of the Atlantic enjoyed an economic bonanza. In 1963 Horst Mahnke, editor of the German magazine Kristall, commissioned Hoepker (twenty-seven at the time) and writer Rolf Winter to do a sort of visual 'On the road' (the German edition of Kerouac's novel came out in 1959).
The couple drove 16,643 miles, from coast to coast and back. Hoepker took thousands of black and white photos and some hundreds of them form the basis of this book. He emigrated to the States in 1976 and in 2020, at eighty-four, repeated the journey but this time taking colour shots.
What I found interesting about the 1963 photos is that they were shot from a European perspective. Hoepker, like Robert Frank a few years before, looked out for the ordinary and unusual to photograph. Even American photographers of the New York School and the Photo League wouldn't bother to capture people sitting at a Woolworth lunch counter or a small-town Independence Day parade but nothing like it existed in Europe.
The photos follow the lie of the land, New York with its subway and skyscrapers, black poverty in the South, small towns and open spaces in the Mid-West, the glitz of Las Vegas, and Los Angeles's sprawl. Not forgetting all that exuberant commercial signage that is everywhere in the US.
The book is different from the normal Steidl production of one photo a page, here are 436 of them, frequently ten to fourteen on a spread but also two or one to a page. The 2020 colour shots are mostly a spread wide. It's printed with a 175 screen on a matt art paper.
I enjoyed looking at several hundred of Koepker's back then and now shots, separated by fifty-seven years they still capture a particular essence of America. You can look inside the book at Westread Book Reviews, then click 2022 and June.
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