John Hopkins, photographer of the Sixties

From John Hopkins: John, Yoko, Mick . . . and me by Ben Machell (Times Online)

You just want to write “Everything”. Because until recently I had only the woolliest appreciation of who Hopkins is and what he has done. In 1961 he morphed from nuclear physicist to roving photojournalist, then going on to become a kingpin of the London underground movement. He brought Allen Ginsberg to the Albert Hall and established the countercultural bible the International Times before helping to launch psychedelia with the hugely influential UFO club. When, in 1967, Hopkins landed in Wormwood Scrubs, sentenced for marijuana possession by a judge who called him “a pest to society” under the punitive drug laws that almost resulted in the jailing of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Paul McCartney paid for a page advertisement in The Times as part of the subsequent campaign to liberalise the drug laws. If you have an interest in Sixties counterculture there are worse people to talk to.

We meet because this month an exhibition opens in London displaying the best of Hopkins's photography from 1961 to 1966. Here, you will find Beat Poets, the Beatles and Stones, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, CND demonstrators and American jazz musicians, captured alongside the eerie austerity of postwar London cityscapes and candid depictions of the era's less celebrated cast: the sex fetishists, the tattoo artists, the prostitutes, the drug addicts and the families who, in the atomic age, still lived in 19th-century poverty.

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“There was a rivalry between all of us, but it was only superficial because we were all striving in the same direction,” he explains, insisting that by writing in depth about sex or drugs, these titles were merely sharing information that hundreds of thousands of people wanted to know about. “I thought that communications systems should be common carriers, like the internet is now, without restriction on content.

“I remember sending a letter out to about 100 people I thought were prime movers in one way or another,” he says, on his theme of putting “communications theory” to work. “I think the year must have been 1967 or 1968. It was meant to be an act of inclusion, a way of saying, 'Hi there, we're all really in the same boat; how are you? This is my contact information, this is what I can do'.” The letter, which he digs out, is signed by Hopkins as well as the founder of Oz, Richard Neville, and the co-founder of Village Voice, John Wilcock. The list of recipients ranges from Yoko Ono to Richard Branson. It's the 1960s countercultural equivalent of an exclusive Facebook group. Continued involvement with it and related activities, such as the London Free School (a communally run centre offering arts workshops and an underground hangout), meant that Hopkins's photography fell by the wayside after 1966. It also accounted, he believes, for his stretch in prison: the Labour politician Wayland Young, Baron Kennet, felt that his daughter, Emily (Young, of Pink Floyd's See Emily Play and now a sculptor), was being led astray by the activities of the Free School. Hopkins claims that “he basically arranged to get me busted. The police came to my place and I was charged [with possession]”.

Six months inside followed. “I'd rather have not been in jail while the Summer of Love was happening,” he grins. On his release he married one of the girls who appeared onstage with Frank Zappa as “Suzy Creamcheese” (for his song Son of Suzy Creamcheese), but she “took off shortly afterwards”. He never remarried.

By the start of the 1970s Hopkins had discovered nascent video technology, becoming head of the video department in the Institute for Research in Art and Technology in London. He believed that it was the most fluid medium for unobstructed, uncensored communications, and helped to found the open-to-all post-production company Fantasy Factory. This in turn led to work with the Centre of Advanced TV Studies and commissions from the Arts Council, Unesco and even the Home Office (there is something nicely subversive about this, given that Hopkins was living in a Camden squat at the time).

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