In 1919, a few months after the Armistice, the celebrity photographer Emil Otto Hoppé set sail from London for an unknown America. During the next five years, Hoppé would crisscross the continent, venturing as far south as Key West and as far west as Seattle. His stated purpose was to capture “the real America” which after four years of war had become “unfamiliar to so many people, even Americans.” He brought not only great artistic skill but a sophisticated eye to this impossible assignment.

Born in Munich in 1878 of Huguenot ancestry, Hoppé moved to London in 1900 where he eventually established himself as the leading studio portraitist of the day; his fashion work appeared regularly in both Vogue and Vanity Fair and even the waspish Cecil Beaton would proclaim him “the Master.” If his achievements are now forgotten, that may be due not so much to the fact that he occasionally cultivated an outmoded style as that he brought an exquisite artificiality to bear on the unruliest of subjects. His images of Pittsburgh steel mills seem as posed as his soft-focus portraits of socialites.

The tension created by this approach gives his best American photographs a strangely timeless look. Each of the 125 plates in “E.O. Hoppé’s Amerika: Modernist Photographs from the 1920s” (Curatorial Assistance/Norton, 176 pages, $49.95), edited and introduced by Phillip Prodger, lends unexpected elegance to often drab locales. When Kafka’s early novel “The Disappeared” was first translated into English, it was titled “Amerika.” Perhaps this is why Mr. Prodger spells America with a “k,” as in German, in his title, as if to remind us that this is a distinctly European view of “America.” If so, it doesn’t quite work, even on the level of allusion. Kafka’s America, as in his famous image of the Statue of Liberty brandishing a sword, was invented. Hoppé by contrast took the real America and idealized it; in his images even industrial rubble displays a glamorous sheen. When Hoppé published a selection of these photos in 1927, he called the book “Romantic America” and that seems just right.

As Mr. Prodger notes in his excellent introduction, Hoppé’s photographs frequently paralleled or anticipated the work of other, more famous contemporaries, such as Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Sheeler, and, a bit later, Walker Evans. Thus, Hoppé’s 1925 image of the Flatiron building, viewed in ghostly perspective through the backlit columns of an adjacent portico, owes much to Stieglitz’s more celebrated — and indeed, iconic — shot of 1903, yet Hoppé’s strikes me as the more beautiful of the two. Again in 1925, Hoppé had the novel idea of photographing rooftops from his window in the Shelton Hotel — then the tallest skyscraper in New York — and two years later, Stieglitz began producing similar views from the same hotel. Stieglitz was openly contemptuous of Hoppé’s work yet clearly was influenced by it. Hoppé had the outsider’s advantage. He saw the American scene with unprejudiced eyes and was cosmopolitan enough to be surprised by what he saw.

Walker Evans, perhaps the greatest of American photographers, certainly learned from Hoppé’s example, yet no two artists could be more different. Both Hoppé and Evans photographed faded storefronts and weathered signs. Hoppé’s 1926 portrait of the façade of the Hotel Torino in California, with its sagging awning and decorous “ladies’ entrance,” captures its dowdy gentility to unforgettable effect; we know the musty smell of its lobby as though we’d spent a weekend there. Yet the image remains strictly documentary; that is its beauty. In an Evans photograph, we’re always in the midst of a story, suspended only by the click of the shutter from what will happen next. In his hands even a country barber’s signboard becomes a small saga. However scathingly, Evans saw America through an affectionate lens. In Dorothea Lange, Wright Morris, and Robert Frank — all influenced by Hoppé’s work — the same storytelling impulse guides the eye.

Hoppé seldom tells stories yet his prints are intensely dramatic. The drama, as well as the energy, of his work lies in its bold composition. In his industrial photographs of Detroit and Pittsburgh — the masterpieces of this superb selection — conveyor belts, girders, trestles, and smokestacks punctuate and frame the human figures; and yet, tiny and almost inconspicuous as the workmen appear, they make the pattern meaningful. In a 1926 vista of tract houses rimmed by oil derricks at Signal Hill in Los Angeles, a lone man stands at a doorway in the foreground, like an accent mark on an indecipherable sentence.

Even when he’s satirical, as in a mordant shot of the roof of the Royal Palm Hotel in Miami, where two buzzards hunch glumly under a bellying star-spangled banner, the black birds aren’t just ominous — they please the eye as shapes. For this extraordinary artist, sheer pleasure in the thing seen was an end in itself and could suffice.