Thomas Hoepker, photographer who captured infamous 9/11 image

Over a long and distinguished career, Thomas Hoepker used his camera to capture deeply shocking and often very moving images with an uncompromising rigour based on honesty rather than sensationalism.
He photographed famine in Ethiopia and the victims of a smallpox epidemic in India. Yet the most controversial picture he ever took featured not the victims of plague, war or any of the other miseries of the human condition but showed five affluent-looking young New Yorkers relaxing by the city’s East River on a bright, cloudless day in September 2001 with seemingly not a care in the world.
What was shocking about the halcyon image was that in the background on the other side of the river, a human tragedy of unimaginable dimensions was unfolding as Hoepker’s camera captured smoke billowing from the stricken Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
Following his professional instincts, on that fateful morning of 9/11, Hoepker had attempted to get to Lower Manhattan but found his route blocked as the subway had stopped running and the roads were closed. Instead, he crossed the Queensboro Bridge and turned south into Brooklyn, all the time keeping in his sights the catastrophe unfolding over the river.
There out of the corner of his eye on the waterfront he saw “an almost idyllic scene — flowers, cypress trees, a group of young people sitting in the sunshine of this splendid late-summer day while the dark, thick plume of smoke was rising in the background”. He got out of his car, shot three frames and drove on.
The following morning, he took his film into the offices of Magnum, the photographers’ co-operative founded by Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson. There he saw hundreds of stark and moving images taken at Ground Zero by his agency colleagues and it was decided to publish a book of them.Hoepker chose three of his own shots taken from the Manhattan Bridge for the book but deliberately omitted the images of the group of young people on the waterfront, fearing they would “stir the wrong emotion”. The pictures, he felt were “ambiguous and confusing” and risked “distorting the reality as we had felt it on that historic day”.
He sat on the images for another five years by which time he had become Magnum’s president, and finally published one of the shots he had initially self-censored on the cover of the 2006 book Watching the World Change.
When it appeared, all hell broke loose. “They were totally relaxed like any normal afternoon. It’s possible they lost people and cared, but they were not stirred by it,” Hoepker said, while the columnist Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times that “the young people in Mr Hoepker’s photo aren’t necessarily callous. They’re just American.”
One of the men in the photo, Walter Sipser, objected and claimed that if Hoepker had bothered to introduce himself he would have found a bunch of New Yorkers who were far from indifferent to the tragedy and were “in the middle of an animated discussion about what had just happened”.
An even more animated debate followed, with Hoepker claiming that the photo was “an example of the confusing horror that took place that day” and that the image touched people precisely because it was “fuzzy and ambiguous in all its sun-drenched sharpness”.
Once the dust had settled, the picture came to be regarded as iconic in the genuine sense of the word for its allegorical power in symbolising one of the defining events in the history of the 21st century. “It is the only photograph of that day to assert the art of the photographer,” the art critic Jonathan Jones wrote. “Among hundreds of devastating pictures that horrify and transfix us, this one stands out as a more ironic, distanced, and therefore artful, image.”
The New York Times went further and compared Hoepker’s photo to the Renaissance painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, attributed to Bruegel, and which WH Auden famously described as depicting humankind’s indifference to suffering as a ploughman, shepherd and fisherman go about their business indifferent to the fate of the drowning Icarus.
As a photojournalist, Hoepker had always retained a healthy scepticism about claims that pointing a camera was an art form. I didn’t study photography — I just did it,” he said. “I am not an artist. I am an image maker.”
Yet he came to recognise that the publication of his infamous 9/11 picture represented a seminal moment in changing perceptions of news photography and a realisation that if the camera never lies, an image can nevertheless be easily manipulated and misconstrued.
“A truly strong photojournalistic image is a reproduction of reality, nothing about it can be faked,” he had once said. Yet he conceded that in the modern world “reality” had become more nuanced. “Today, there’s more room for interpretation by the photographer and style, eye and aesthetic all matter. Everyone has to make his own decision on how far he wants to go in presenting reality through his own eyes.”
Thomas Hoepker was born in Munich in 1936 and began taking photographs at 14 when his grandfather gave him an old-fashioned glass-plate camera. He learnt to develop his prints in the family bathroom and began selling pictures to friends and classmates, using the income to finance his studies in art history and archaeology at university in Göttingen.
Working for German magazines, one of his first assignments in the early 1960s was to take a road trip across the United States on which he captured both the prosperity of postwar American culture and the darker side of the dream with shots of a Korean War veteran, with both legs amputated, begging on the streets and a homeless man slumped in front of a garbage can on a New York sidewalk.
By 1964 he was working for Stern, travelling the globe to capture a turbulent world in a state of flux. From the beginning his favourite subject was people, whether it was children playing next to the Berlin Wall or celebrities such as Muhammad Ali, with whom he developed a close rapport.
His portrait of the heavyweight champion raising his fist to the photographer’s lens is one of the most memorable images taken of the boxer. “Ali was the ideal model because he did not interfere, or do any poses,” he recalled. “He saw me during a break between rounds in training, and he came out of the ring towards me — right fist, left fist, right fist, and then the bell rang to take him back. This was the only shot that was sharp and well exposed, so it became the famous picture.”
With his then wife, the journalist Eva Windmöller, he spent two years in the early 1970s living in East Berlin, one of the few photographers from the West accredited by the communist authorities to document life behind the Iron Curtain.
By 1976, he was back in America as Stern’s New York correspondent. He remained resident in the city for the rest of his life with his third wife, Christine Kruchen, who survives him.
In 2020 after he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s she helped him retrace his 1960s road trip across the United States. His contemporary colour photographs from the latter journey were published alongside his earlier black-and-white images in the book The Way It Was while the trip was chronicled in the 2022 documentary film, Dear Memories.
To the end he remained uncomfortable with the notion of the photographer as an artist. “I was a street walker and took pictures of whatever I found interesting,” he said.
Thomas Hoepker, photographer, was born on June 10, 1936. He died from complications arising from Alzheimer’s disease on July 10, 2024, aged 88