FARSANG Interviews: James Hopkirk
Photojournalist and founder of South London Stories, James Hopkirk, joined FARSANG for a chat about his life, career, and the vital work he does with South London Stories.
FARSANG Journal: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us, James. To start with, how did your career start? Did you always imagine that you would end up doing something with a social focus?
James Hopkirk: My career began just about twenty four years ago as a local paper reporter - what was a traditional route into journalism, although even then it was becoming less traditional. I then got onto a training program at The Sunday Times, and then I made what was probably quite an uncommon move, from The Sunday Times to MTV. I worked for their website and started getting into digital stuff, something that was really interesting and instructive for me. It is where I first felt how exciting it can be to work online, and how easy dissemination can be. After this I became the editor of an arts charity called IdeasTap, which sadly is no longer. Whilst all of this was happening, pretty much since my Sunday Times days, I was freelancing as a writer-photographer. I started getting very excited about the combination of text and images, and particularly about being in control of both. Perhaps it’s sometimes hubristic, not wanting to cede control, but I think it’s also about wanting to do the story as truly as you can. More importantly, I enjoyed it! I enjoy taking photos, and I enjoy writing. The world is obviously moving closer to ever shorter video, but actually I still see a place for slower, longer work. For me, still images and text work really well in that way. For the work I do now, the text and the images are completely interlinked, they are entirely dependent on each other.
As for South London Stories: when the arts charity closed, I saw an opportunity to go and do something I’d always wanted to do. I did an MA in documentary photography at the London College of Communication (LCC) in Elephant & Castle. It was interesting to come into the course as a mature student, and I found the course really challenging and it made me question my work in the best possible way. I went into it knowing that I wanted to do something different, something that was a lot more local and more personal. I also knew that there were issues in my community that I knew I wanted to work on, but it was during my first term in 2015 that South London Stories began. I initially called it Lambeth: Living with the cuts, which is a blog that still exists. The idea was to look at a national issue - austerity and government cuts since 2010 - but to look at it at a local level. I knew from the very beginning that it was going to be a long term project, and I knew that the MA was going to be the springboard as it was when I would have the most time to work on it. I miss having that time! I built up these relationships with local organisations, helping with things like photography and copy-editing. Through this I got to meet some of the people they worked with, but also to benefit from their expertise as organisations. I’ve been working on this project for seven years now, and I certainly know a lot more than when I started, but I’m never going to be a specialist on benefits or a statutory housing specialist - these organisations are incredibly helpful in giving me access to knowledge about communities so that I’m not making mistakes and that I’m asking the right questions. With that said, I should mention that I am completely independent and do not work for these organisations, and the work I do with individual service users is collaborative and I am not independent of them, but I am independent of the organisations that support them. What they provide is a really critical safeguarding role and expertise. So it started with Lambeth Living With the Cuts, and now it has become South London Stories. Calling it LLWTC meant that it immediately restricted it to people who lived in Lambeth, and someone who thinks that ‘cuts’ is too political for them is immediately not going to read it. It’s still very much a theme, I just don’t want to bat people over the head with it and for it to be the first thing they read - I want to draw people in with stories that fundamentally interest anyone.
FJ: Am I right in saying that when you choose a story to follow you already have a ‘macro’ issue in mind ? Or do you start with an individual which then leads you to the bigger issue?
JH: The truth is it varies. Iain and Roy for example, was people first. The issue, living with dementia, is there but that was a people first project because I knew relevant people who introduced me to Iain and so on. More commonly it is usually issue first, for example I’ll know that I want to work on homelessness: so I’ll start approaching a homelessness organisation like Ace of Clubs and spend time with them - I spent several years just hanging out there and having lunch with people - and eventually I’ll be introduced to individuals who I’ll work with on a story. That’s how I met Mark. That was always going to be a story that was to do with homelessness (and other themes it touches on like addiction), but it started with an issue. Now, whether I define what the issue is going to be or someone else does, varies. For the latest story I worked on called ‘It’s what I know’, someone working in the homelessness sector approached me and told me ‘you should be doing something on sex work and what little support there is for sex workers’. So generally, the issue is the starting point. But, what I think of as the starting point can often go in all sorts of different directions.
FJ: You let the subjects tell their own stories in a very natural way and every different subject has its own narrative, but despite this there seems to be a coherent style throughout the pieces. Did you get this from somewhere, or does it come instinctively when doing this sort of work?
JH: I would say it evolved organically but it has been influenced by ideas that were opened up to me when I was doing the MA. When I say the project has evolved, I also mean that it has become more collaborative as it has gone on. I hope in a way that the stories feel different both visually and textually to reflect the results of different collaborations and not just me - It’s What I Know comes from a very different type of collaboration than what I did with Mark’s story. They’re both highly collaborative but they’re totally different. Taking Mark’s story for example, Mark left the text more to me - and this was the result of conversations we had over two years - but he had such a strong view on how the photographs should be taken. Particularly the pictures of the places where he spent time, he was there with me looking at the back of my camera going ‘No! Too dark! We need to come back when it’s raining!’ Sometimes we’d then look at photos afterwards on a laptop and he’d say ‘no, this doesn’t work, we have to go back and reshoot it’. It was great! It’s a good way of letting go of ego - to the extent that that’s even possible. In this context, my visual opinion of what homelessness looks like or feels like is completely irrelevant. What do I know? Nothing. I don’t mean this in a self-flagellating way, but just from an accuracy point of view. What can I bring to that? I can’t bring anything. By working with someone like Mark, I’m working with an absolute expert - he can help produce something that is more accurate. I guess also more specifically, we are trying to produce something that is true to his experience. The stories don’t claim to be universal, they claim to be as close a representation as we can of what the people I have worked with experienced.
FJ: On an aesthetic level - let’s say you are working on a project without as strong a ‘creative director’ as Mark, how do you approach making these images and transforming them into a story?
JH: Usually the first photos that I’ll take will be rubbish. They’ll be the obvious ones that you have to take, but I find shooting the obvious helpful to get it out of your system. These are the photos that almost never get included. From there, you start to find the less obvious pictures. In terms of how I go about it, I’m not an incredibly technical photographer. I’m not that interested in technical processes like using a large format camera or something, I use the camera that I have. I approach it in a photojournalistic way initially, and from there I build out to photos that are less journalistic - usually photos that represent the past. This is quite a big thing: I’m often working with people who tell stories that have happened in the past. How do you represent the past? Well, this can be through locations and objects for example. I think the process is very specific to each story. Depending on what is happening in each story, I spend a lot of time thinking ‘what’s the right visual strategy for this story?’ In a way, I treat photos similarly to how I treat writing. You have to get some words down, however bad they are - from bad words, come better words. Likewise with photos, from bad photos come better photos. Since I work on things long term, I have the luxury of doing this and building on things slowly. A part of this that is always hard is forcing yourself not to include photos that you really like because you know that would be best for the story overall. This is when it really helps to work with somebody else!
FJ: Working with themes that are more abstract, such as mental health (A Fragile Recovery), must be very different from working in a journalistic way. Is working with more artistic, abstract themes something you learned after doing this more journalistic work?
JH: Again, I think I would credit the MA. I would credit them for making me look at a lot more photography and photographers. My eyes have been opened to a lot of work I hadn’t come across before and I was taught to shoot in different ways. But for that specific story, I think those shots come simply from the time I had in the building. Although I spent time with people there, an awful lot of it was spent wandering around corridors or sitting there, getting a feel for being in that building. When you are working as a professional photographer on a very short timeline, it takes a much better photographer than me to get those really unusual, interesting pictures. All the photographers I admire so much are able to come out with these amazing, thoughtful, ambiguous and interesting photos from just a day’s work! I would really struggle to do that. However, if I’m given a week and lots of time to think and spend time on it, I think those pictures come quite naturally.
FJ: In a career sense, how do you balance your ‘professional’ work with South London Stories? Not that SLS isn’t professional!
JH: South London Stories is a completely uncommercial project, and it always will be. It is what it is by definition, and I think it has to be this way. It is funded by the work that I do, but at the start of the project I won something called a Mead Fellowship (open to UAL graduates), and this helped with things like setting up my website and holding my first exhibition. But now I work commercially as a digital content producer, copywriter, commercial photographer and freelance working more generally. All of this stuff supports South London Stories and makes it possible.
FJ: So is South London Stories the priority? Do you have the sense that you work in order to be able to do South London Stories?
JH: Totally. I’m so grateful for the work that I have because it enables me to do this work that I love so much. I find it so constantly interesting. There’s one thing I heard, and I sadly never met him before he died but Tim Hetherington is someone I really admire, and he made the point that you can’t just be outraged by something. You have to be really interested and fascinated by what you are doing too - I think there is truth in this because it is really hard to sustain something long term, you have to be really interested in it as well. I am absolutely outraged by the hardship and injustice I see. It’s grotesque and vile, and I want as many people as possible to see it, particularly locally. But it is also incredibly interesting working on this stuff - I get to meet amazing people, whether through the stories or organisations: people working on tiny budgets and tiny staff doing incredible things! I had to give a talk the other day, and someone asked me ‘how do you maintain your drive?’, which I think is a fair question. But I thought, for me it’s the easiest thing in the world! Maybe in the future I won’t want to do it anymore, but I cannot imagine that at the moment after seven years of working on this. It’s just inconceivable to me.
FJ: Has research always been something you enjoy when making a photoessay? Or is it a necessity you maybe enjoy less?
JH: Definitely. The research is a great part of it. From before the MA and South London Stories, it was just drilled into me to do lots of research as a journalist. A lot of old school journalism ideas like ‘you have to become an instant expert’, are being rightfully left behind - and this piece of advice is of course an utter contradiction in terms and an impossibility, but what this drilled into me is to read and devour everything you possibly can before you start to do something. With that said, I think the most valuable research that happens with South London Stories is the conversations, like in Ace of Clubs. The couple of years that I spent there having lunch at least once a week, speaking to people who were happy to chat to me, is an example of this.
FJ: Where do you see the project going? Would you like to have more of an explicitly political role in helping bring about change?
JH: I can’t make any claims as to how effective it is on a political level, but I do know that people working in homelessness or the social sector locally have read the stories and fed back. After Mark’s story, he and I went to do a Q&A together at a gathering of homelessness organisations. That was great, because he really loved having the opportunity to say what he wanted in front of that audience - he had a lot to get off his chest. I’m really interested in that sort of thing, if it could reach service providers, people in local government. In a party political way? No, I’d never want it to be political in that way. But if it could just reach people locally, people around where I live in South London, and make them rethink their preconceptions - and I say this as someone who started this from a position of absolute ignorance, and I continue to be very ignorant. But hopefully if I can get more people to understand these sorts of issues and perhaps think in less black and white ways about them, and more importantly, think of these issues from the point of view of the people experiencing them, then that’s something I would want to achieve.
Check out our favourite South London Stories: