Anthony Hopewell
Anthony Hopewell has been a practising photographer and filmmaker since graduating in 1973, with first-class honours, from the renowned photography course at Trent Polytechnic (now Nottingham Trent University), where he studied with Thomas Joshua Cooper, Ray Moore, John Mulvaney and Paul Hill amongst others.
He was subsequently awarded an MA (with Distinction) from DMU.
Alongside his commercial work, Anthony has always been involved in both personal independent practice and in photographic education, teaching on various undergraduate and post-graduate programmes in the UK, since 2007 at Falmouth University in Cornwall.
"Evidence of Unknown Journeys", photographs by Anthony Hopewell, is a body of work based around the notion of movement; both physical movement, forward through the landscape (these small-camera works are moments of stasis created whilst engaged in the act of walking), and conceptually backwards through time, evidenced through the intimate examination of the historical traces of our forbears. Cities, towns, people, the usual fare of the flaneur, are all currently out of bounds.
Bridleways, holloways, tramways, traditional walking routes, retain, even in lockdown, privileged access, and it is movement through this network that forms the basis of these new works. Though started several years ago as an exploration into the notion of
pilgrimage, how traditional routes have become commodified, secularised, in pursuit of the tourist dollar, that work was never resolved.
The interest in the notion of movement however persisted; in film work looking at the historical dislocation of Cornish miners in a southern Spanish diaspora, the Iberian Grand Tour was undertaken by a young Lord Byron, and in the restless thought adventures of D H Lawrence.
This current work marks Hopewell's return to still-image making, through a
practice predicated on walking. Rather than providing details of a route, as favoured by walking artists such as Richard Long or Hamish Fulton, Hopewell's works are not forensically annotated with the traditional navigator's tools of Latitude and Longitude or
Distance and Duration.
These images stand as moments of stasis, testaments to things seen and carefully observed whilst travelling on foot. As such they are more influenced by the writings of Iain Sinclair, Rebecca Solnit, Simon Armitage, Simon Schama, Robert Macfarlane and Roland Barthes, than by the more familiar photographic tropes of grandiose landscape photography.
These photographs are produced as pigment prints on delicate Japanese papers and are available in editions limited to 5.”
