Hopperesque

Edith and the Kingpin, Oakland, July 2007.

The influence of Edward Hopper on how we see things is so profound that his name has become an adjective: "Hopper," according to English writer Geoff Dyer, "has come to evoke a real place that looks like a Hopper as often as it refers to an actual painting."

The "Hopper look," represented famously in Nighthawks, has been quoted time and again in movies to telegraph loneliness, shadowy isolation or the seemingly interminable passing of time, perhaps most memorably in film noir and the films of Wim Wenders: Million Dollar Hotel, The End of Violence, and Don't Come Knocking, which Wenders called "a tribute to my favorite painter."

Hopper's influence on photography is equally vast. Edward Hopper & Company, edited by Jeffrey Fraenkel, is the catalog of a recent San Francisco exhibition that demonstrates the spirit of Hopper in the works of eight masters of photography: Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Harry Callahan, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and Stephen Shore.

The photographs below are from the exhibition; the paintings are not (the gallery used other paintings and drawings from its collection). Fraenkel pointedly states in his preface that none of these photographers sought to imitate Hopper in any way; these pictures are not pastiche. Some of them, he said, would actually be surprised to find themselves included in the exhibition.

Perhaps no one more so than Walker Evans. Evans' early works from the 1930s have been compared to Hopper's architectural landscapes for having the same "airless nostalgia for the past." Evans has denied the influence, and claims that he was not aware of Hopper or his work at the time. But Dyer is skeptical. "There is no getting away from or avoiding [Hopper]," he said. "To see his pictures is to begin to inhabit them. You see them everywhere even when you are not looking at them." And that pretty much sums up Hopper's invisible but lingering legacy for all photographers.

Walker Evans, Main Street Block, Selma, Alabama, 1936.

Lee Friedlander, Las Vegas, 1970.

Stephen Shore, JJ Summer's Agency, Duluth, MN, 1973.

Robert Frank, Santa Fe, Mexico, 1955.

Diane Arbus, Lady in a rooming house parlor, NY, 1963.

Robert Adams, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1968.


Wim Wenders and Donata Wenders, From "The Heart is a Sleeping Beauty"
Donata Wenders, Still shot from "Don't Come Knocking"

THE PAINTINGS:
Nighthawks, 1942. Early Sunday Morning, 1930. A Woman in the Sun, 1961. Drugstore, 1927. Gas, 1940. Hotel by a Railroad, 1952. Night Windows, 1928.

Hats

Man on Train, San Francisco, March 2009.




There are many things about my personal appearance I don't like, but what rankles my vanity most of all is that I look silly wearing a hat. More than any other fashion accessory, a hat has the power to summon images from our memory. Most of them, of course, are movie images: gangster shootouts from the 30s, Cary Grant, Preston Sturges screwball comedies, Indiana Jones on horseback losing his Fedora again and again, Jack Nicholson in Chinatown saying "I'm just a snoop." My own memory of hats takes me back to Philippine cockfighting arenas in the 1960s, where hundreds of men wearing straw hats and closed-toe leather slippers screamed and hollered in the bleachers while two fighting cocks decked it out in the center of the sandy ring.

The sight of a man in a hat never fails to put my photographer's instinct at attention. Add a trench coat and I hit the ground running. It's almost impossible to take an uninteresting picture of a man wearing a hat because the drama is right there, sitting on top of his head.

In his book, The Ongoing Moment (a must read for photography lovers), Geoff Dyer said that the story of the Great Depression can be told simply by looking at pictures of men's hats. Poring through Dorothea Lange's portfolio of the depression years, Dyer looked at all the pictures with hats. He discovered that the hats, once signs of affluence, became more and more battered with each passing year until finally, in photographs of Skid Row, men slept on sidewalks using their hats for pillows. Dyer observed that by the 1950s "the great era of hats in photography has passed" and "it was no longer a reliable indicator of the ravages inflicted on men by economic forces..." As in the picture above by Garry Winogrand, "the hat was [now] just a hat."


Garry Winogrand, Untitled, 1950s.
Dorothea Lange, White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, 1937.
Tina Modotti, Workers Parade, 1926.
Saul Leiter, Harlem, 1960.
Dorothea Lange, Ball Game, Migrant Camp, Shafter, California, 1934.