|
|
 |
| |
Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones at Alexandra Palace, 1964. |
Camden Book Reviews | Photographs | John 'Hopppy' Hopkins | From the Hip
Photographs from a long-forgotten dusty box capture the mood of a defining decade. Dan Carrier talks to John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, the man behind the camera
JOHN Lennon and Mick Jagger had lain under a bed in a box next to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, forgotten about for more than 30 years.
It wasn’t until a friend of John “Hoppy” Hopkins, who had worked as photojournalist between 1960 to 1966, asked if she could look through some old boxes to get material for a photo exhibition she was compiling that the strength of the archive became apparent: Hoppy had taken pictures of some of the leading lights in 1960s music, politics and London’s counter-culture scene.
“My black and white negatives were just stashed under my bed, and they were rediscovered really by accident,” he recalls.
“I’d not thought about them for years. A friend was looking for an early video I had made when she noticed a picture I’d taken of The Rolling Stones. I told her I thought I may have other similar pictures and we went through these dusty old boxes to see what we could find.”
The results are now collated in a new picture book, whose subjects range from John Lee Hooker, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong through to counter-culture figures such as William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Other pictures capture a mid-60s London which has disappeared: children playing on bomb sites, Victorian slums in Notting Hill and tenement blocks that were to be demolished to make room for the West Way.
“I tend to look forwards, think about my next project, rather than consider what I have just done,” says Hoppy. “When I was a photographer, I did not think what the significance of the pictures I was taking would have 40 years later.” Sadly, much of his collection has disappeared – he gave some away, and negatives were lost as he moved about.
Hoppy was given his first camera as a university graduation present from his godfather in 1958. He had no interest in photography at the time, but soon discovered a natural talent.
He gradually learnt his trade and sold a few pictures to The Guardian. After working for a time as a photographer’s assistant he managed to find freelance work in Fleet Street.
“I found myself in a rich cultural environment – jazz, poetry, literature, arts, political protest, free love, experimentation – and followed my instincts when it came to earning a living with a camera. This meant working on both sides of the boundary between straight and alternative lifestyles – snapping the prime minister at lunch time, mixing it in Notting Hill at night.”
Through his contacts with the peace movement covering CND marches that he had the opportunity to photograph Martin Luther King.
“I was working occasionally for a newspaper called Peace News, and they were organising a conference in Oxford,” he says. It was 1963. I went there and saw King, took his picture for the paper.”
He recalls how little coverage such events got in the mainstream press: “King was not so well known in Britain at the time but still, there was not one mention of him, no reference at all, to this visit or the conference itself.”
Hoppy’s career as a photographer began to be curtailed by his interests in other spheres – “I began to feel frustrated working for the press barons where I could not choose the agenda and was basically a small cog in the capitalist machine” – and he began promoting events and running other, counter-culture schemes.
He was behind the UFO Club at the Roundhouse, which saw Pink Floyd perform and Jimi Hendrix drop in for a jam. The book contains shots of the Roundhouse when it was owned by Gilbey’s Gin. An empty Chalk Farm Road, devoid of cars, features, as do hundreds of barrels of spirits stacked on what is now the stage of the performing arts centre.
His career took him ringside with some of the most iconic faces of the 20th century, but his work does not rely on celebrities. The collection includes shots of a post-war world yet to be swinging: Soho tattoo parlours and the bed sits of prostitutes; railway porters at St Pancras; drug dealers peddling dope in Cable Street; the Ace Café where leather-clad bikers hung out; couples kissing on benches in Hyde Park and derelict, squatted houses on the Harrow Road.
Film producer and music promoter Joe Boyd, who was Hoppy’s partner running the UFO Club from 1966-67, met Hoppy after he was commissioned to work for Melody Maker.
“Looking back through Hoppy’s lens you get a whiff of a city throwing off the shackles of class obedience, cultural timidity and moral hypocrisy,” he says.
“The photos he took in earlier years show us not only a society getting ready for the upheavals to come but also the qualities of the man who took them, unchanging whether behind or in front of the camera.”
It seems incredible that his career as a photojournalist was so brief, and was left untouched for such a long period.
From the Hip. Photographs by John “Hoppy” Hopkins 1960-66.
Damiani £24.99 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
