Albert Scopin Schöpflin’s New Photobook Returns to the Chelsea Hotel’s Private Rooms
For Albert Scopin Schöpflin, the Chelsea Hotel was never just a famous address. It was a crash course in New York’s social codes, a place where the architecture of a 12-story building could double as a map of status, and where a young photographer’s sense of self could be dismantled and rebuilt.
Now, the German photographer has distilled that formative period into a new photobook, Chelsea Hotel, published by Kerber Verlag. The volume gathers his portraits of the hotel’s residents and visitors, often photographed in the intimate theater of their own rooms, alongside candid recollections that sketch the building’s atmosphere from the inside.
Scopin grew up in southern Germany near the borders of France and Switzerland. After a stint studying in Munich left him feeling constrained, he began imagining New York with increasing intensity during an illness. He eventually moved to the city and found work assisting the fashion photographer Bill King, a figure Scopin describes as notoriously temperamental.
His decision to live at the Hotel Chelsea, as it was commonly called, was pragmatic. The building, which began as a residency co-op in the 1880s, had long since accumulated a mythology of bohemian life. But Scopin remembers it as a place with a “serious class system,” one that aligned with the hotel’s vertical layout: “lovely suites up top,” and, lower down, his own spare setup — a “darkroom with a tap.”
If the arrangement sounded bleak, Scopin suggests he barely had time to dwell on it. The hotel’s constant churn of personalities and ideas, he recalls, forced a rapid recalibration. “I met so many fascinating people who kept confronting me with new ideas and lifestyles, so my entire value system collapsed and had to be rebuilt,” he said.
That social intensity also shaped his photographic practice. At night, King’s team staged nude shoots of celebrities, largely for amusement, and it was through that orbit that Scopin met poet Patti Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, both of whom lived at the Chelsea. Soon, he developed his own side project: documenting the hotel’s inhabitants, frequently framing them through the idiosyncrasies of their rooms.
The book’s portraits are punctuated by specific cultural moments that passed through the building’s corridors. Scopin references Jackie Curtis’s production Vain Victory: The Vicissitudes of the Damned (1970), as well as Christopher Street Liberation Day that same year, anchoring the hotel’s private dramas to a wider public history.
What gives Chelsea Hotel its particular charge is the photographer’s refusal to varnish his memories. His short commentaries are bluntly personal: he describes The Female Eunuch author Germaine Greer as “one of the most unpleasant people I met there,” and notes that installation artist Stella Waitzkin’s space was “quite dusty.” The effect is less nostalgia than texture — a reminder that the Chelsea’s legend was built from daily life as much as from celebrity.
Scopin opens the book by recalling an exhibition of his work at the 2022 Venice Biennale, an experience that left him skeptical about art-world attention when it becomes detached from genuine engagement. “There were lots of people there and a lot of talking and writing went on, but there wasn’t a spark of interest,” he said. “It was just about being there, not about the substance.”
In that light, Chelsea Hotel reads as an attempt to restore substance to a story that has often been flattened into lore. By returning to the rooms — their clutter, their performances, their quiet unease — Scopin offers a portrait of a place where artistic identity was not a brand but a lived, sometimes uncomfortable, experiment.
Chelsea Hotel is out now from Kerber Verlag.
