Tim Hopwood is a well established artist in Port Elizabeth. His Photography has achieved national acclaim with one of his recent exhibitions entitled "Shift" being entirely purchased by the Nelson Mandela Art Museum.

Tim Hopwood is a well established artist in Port Elizabeth. His Photography has achieved national acclaim with one of his recent exhibitions entitled "Shift" being entirely purchased by the Nelson Mandela Art Museum. His visual style can be described as documentary based. Tim has had eight solo exhibitions which have all received a great deal of attention from critics and audience alike. 

Tim is also a poet and musician exploring the realms of society, politics and life. His is currently in the process of completing his first full length album which we eagerly await.

Hope Was Inevitable

The Photography of Tim Hopwood 

Tim Hopwood grins and hands a small book over to me. “I found it”, he informs me. “I lost it a while ago”. I glance at the cover of the, well, to be perfectly honest, quite unimpressive looking little book, and read the title: Alternative Tunings for Guitar. I smile and hand the little treasure map back over to him, a fuller understanding dawning. He reaches over to a guitar leaning up against the wall, and promptly beckons me to sit down while he offers to boil the kettle for a cup of coffee. “I’ve been looking for it for a long while”. You see - Hopwood is obsessed with weird tunings. Guitar tunings that simply no sane man would ever attempt to use and play live in front of an audience; mainly because you would need a different guitar for each song.

I think he likes that idea.

Tim Hopwood is a fine arts photographer that is considered by many to be the finest operating out of the Eastern Cape, and some would be so bold as to venture, and with definite cause, one of the finest in the entire country. His most recent body of work, This is Where the King Came, was exhibited at the Textures Gallery in Port Elizabeth in April this year, and he is currently putting the finishing touches on his own printing/studio gallery, quite conveniently situated across the road from his Central home. “It’s realistically a place where I can have some space to keep some work permanently on the walls, as well as do his my own printing” he says. 

After studying a Graphic Design Diploma at the Port Elizabeth, with the admission that he coasted along doing the bare minimum (“After all, I could draw quite well”) and that he did not really enjoy it, Tim graduated in 1989. His father, as Tim puts it, mercifully offered to pay for another three years of study – it was the late eighties in South Africa, and although not mentioned too much these days, all white males were up for a stint in the army at some point – and he enrolled at the Rhodes University’s Fine Arts Faculty, after finally realizing that Photography was his calling. It would be incredibly hard to distill four years of study into a few sentences, but I am sure anyone who remembers the period before the first democratic elections in South Africa can attest to it being a time of great energy, confusion and hope.

I guess South Africa had also found its book of alternative tunings…

Four years later, studying under the inimitable Obie Oberholzer (one of the personalities of the South African photographic world), Tim left Rhodes with a degree under his belt. A few more years of wandering, including a short stint overseas, and three years of commercial work in Cape Town, he found himself back in the Eastern Cape, lecturing photography at the Port Elizabeth Technikon until the end of 1999. Citing fundamental differences, which could possibly be translated as a desire to take photographs that are not merely intended to sell products, Hopwood left for Cape Town, but after a year found himself back in Port Elizabeth on a more permanent basis.

And this is where we find Tim Hopwood now, fine art photographer, with nine solo exhibitions under his belt, a finalist in the Brett Kebble Awards 2004, and the only photographic artist making a living off of his art in the Eastern Cape. And one of the few people who I know can rattle off massive chunks of Homer Simpson verbatim, while at the same time trying to tune a guitar into a D minor diminished seventh (“JJ Cale had a song in this one… D’Oh”).

I ask Tim why he decided to make Port Elizabeth and the Eastern Cape his home, and realistically the major subject of his work. It doesn’t take him long to answer. Like most really talented people, the whole Cape Town and Joburg thing gets a bit, well, facile after a while, and being down here in this little forgotten part of the world affords a bit context and an opportunity to avoid the hoi poloi - Tim’s word, I suggested glitterati - that goes with the art industry. There is that alternative tuning thing again.

“Besides”, Tim says, “It’s my turf…” And grins.

Which is true. The last two major exhibitions of his work, Shift, and the aforementioned This is where the King Came, reflect change in Port Elizabeth. Shift concentrated on the streets of Port Elizabeth, primarily dilapidated buildings and structures in Govan Mbeki/Main Street and the surrounding industrial areas. Grainy Black and White images painting a less than pristine picture of Port Elizabeth is hardly the way to go when trying to sell photographs is it? It’s too real. And too uncomfortable. But not that uncomfortable to dissuade the King George IV Gallery in Port Elizabeth from purchasing the entire exhibition. His latest exhibition did much the same, taking Kings Beach as the main setting. Color images marking the changes, not only man-made, but also environmental, happening right in front of our collective noses each day. “The flooding at high tide at the beach didn’t always use to happen so spectacularly than it does these days”. The Gallery also saw fit to purchase a chunk of this exhibition as well.

Perhaps the greatest mark of respect a photographic artist can get is to live up to what they are defined as. Or what they think they need to be. I asked Tim what he considered a photographic artist to be. A few things emerged while the idea tossed around coffee-addled minds. A collector of detritus. Scientists of sorts – classifying human existence. A classifier of change. A provider of evidence for our existence as humanity.

A witness at our trial.

All these things hold themselves to be self-evident, and with the Gallery purchasing such a major body of work that reflects Port Elizabeth as it is now, is an indicator of how vital Tim’s work is. And how important his work is as a catalogue of change for the city.

Tim lets me in to a little secret, his new song. And yes, it is in another ridiculous tuning. I look over at the glint in his eyes and the large smile on his face as he strums, and think:
   
It’s good to know that there are still a few notes in this town we haven’t heard before.