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German born, yet English by citizenship, photographer Emil Otto Hoppe has been called one of England’s most influential photographers of the Edwardian era. Born in Munich in 1878, Hoppe was actively photographing from about 1910 to 1940. Known for his portrait studies, his subjects ranged from the upper class British society to the natives of the Americas and Asia.

While Hoppe’s still life images were remarkable in their own right. As a photographer he also documented London before the First World War and published a number of books on the city in the early 1930’s. He is known to have photographed famous personalities including Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, TS Eliot, Albert Einstein as well as Rabindranath Tagore.

Two exhibitions showcasing his work can now be seen this year, The first one is shown in India for the first time, and is entitled "Hoppe’s Bombay 1929 and Santiniketan". It commemorates the 150th birth centenary of poet Rabindranath Tagore, who invited Hoppe to visit India in 1929. The exhibition includes photographs of Mumbai and Santiniketan, the university started by Tagore in West Bengal. The EO Hoppe Estate Collection in California published these pictures in the 1990s. The Mumbai photos are of street scenes of south Mumbai, Malabar Hill etc. The exhibition will then travel to Tagore's city, Kolkata, where it will be displayed at the Victoria Memorial Hall from April 16 to May 30, and from there the exhibition will travel to New Orleans. Details of the Mumbai exhibit can be found here.

The second one entitled "Hoppe Portraits: Society, Studio and Street" will be held at the National Portrait Gallery in London from February. Details of the exhibition can be found here, and a news article here.

Photo: Victoria Terminus, Bombay 1929, by Emil Otto Hopp ©

In 1909, R. Herman Cassens, a young entrepreneur, started a postcard company, the Eastern Illustrating and Publishing Company, in the mid-coast town of Belfast, Maine. Postcards have always been a popular item, especially for travelers, but at the turn of the century they were the absolute rage.

Cassens saw a niche between personal/amateur postcards and the mass-produced postcards available in the bigger cities. He had a dream of "Photographing the Transcontinental Trail--Maine to California," focusing on small rural towns and villages. He and his small crew of photographers traveled through rural New England and New York focusing their lenses on locally known landmarks, street scenes, country stores and businesses, events and people.  Cassens sold his business in 1947 and died in 1948. Though his dream of photographing all 48 states was not realized, his company did manage to make over 40,000 glass plate negatives of New England and New York between 1909 and 1947.

The glass plate images seemed to die along with Cassens. The company stopped producing the "real photo post cards" and eventually switched to the more contemporary color postcards. The glass plates were left in storage, collecting dust for the next 40 years, until the Rockport Institute for Photographic Education acquired them in the late 1980s. In June of 2005, the monstrous task began of cleaning, identifying, organizing, cataloging and scanning the glass plates. In early 2007, the collection once again changed hands after a near disaster. A broken pipe caused a flood in the building on Rockport Harbor where they were stored. The collection was soaked but a strong effort saved it and the collection was ultimately donated to the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, just a few miles from where the whole story began.

Details of an exhibition based on this archive can be found here, a video here and information on the collection here.