Artist research-Christian Hopkins

Christian Hopkins

Christian Hopkins, whose images experiment with combining self-portraiture and conceptual techniques, achieving dramatic and emotive results. Christian’s path into the photographic world was instigated when he received a camera as a gift and despite his reservations, forced himself to start photographing. Photography made him see the world in a more beautiful light and soon became a tool for Christian in battling his demons, providing a form of therapy in coping with his depression and allowing him a channel to communicate his emotions. 

'Whenever I felt controlled by a particular emotion, I wouldn't be able to think or concentrate properly until I took that emotion out of my head and trapped it in a photograph.' After a bout of depression and subsequent suicide attempts, Christian discovered Flickr his senior year of high school. At first, he began copying the style or other photographers he found through the picture-sharing website, before eventually finding his own surreal style.

‘Photography became a form of therapy that I could use to fight my depression,’

‘I would create an emotion that I was feeling so that I could see it. Once it was on the page, it was no longer in my head and that was incredibly relieving.’

Christian's favorite image that he has taken is one titled ‘Inner Demons’, because it ‘so accurately’ depicts what he is feeling, and he believes that anyone looking at the photograph can immediately understand the conflicted emotions that he is trying to convey, without ever having felt that way themselves.

‘It connects me to everyone who looks at that picture,’ 

Christian Hopkin's work is breath taking, the images are stunning, haunting and heat breaking, some images are true to real life and other have been inspired by films such as The Lovely Bones. His work is extremely personal and creative, the images are clean and the reason behind them is what I inspire to. 

For someone that used his work as a way of portraying how he felt he gained a huge following rather quickly, I can see why. The reason why I have included his work is because how blunt the images are, they do not spin a romantic undertone, they show the ugly truth behind depression. This is what I wish to show in my work.