Douglas Hopkins

Douglas Hopkins started his working life as a ranch hand in Montana, after a childhood in Alaska and Boston.  He attended the University of California, San Diego. 

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He completed an intensive, two-year, private program in teaching photographic awareness with the reclusive Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, Minor White, author of "The Zone System Manual", an immersion in the precise, artisan, photographic film methods of Ansel Adams, the famed American landscapist. 

 

A staff member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences and the senior technician on the MIT's NASA lunar landing advisory committee, Hopkins designed and deployed a photographic system for close-hand measurements of active volcano eruptions, used in the extrapolation of Martian & lunar geology.  Barely surviving the hazards of that global plate-tectonic career, he embarked on a twenty-year commercial and art photography pursuit. 

 

He was first introduced to the Polaroid company by Ansel Adams, eventually becoming their primary Cambridge-based commercial photographer then continuing with the company onto his New York City studio for over a decade.  He served Polaroid as a product consultant and photography personality. Along with Andy Warhol, he was a principal artistic and fashion influence on Polaroid. Both he and Warhol became the masters of Polaroid's unprecedented "20x24", the world's largest-ever semi-portable view camera.

 

He began in NYC as a staff photographer for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, then emerging in fashion & beauty publications, including the Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, W, WWD, Vogue, Connoisseur, Rolling Stone, Mademoiselle, Elle, Barrons, Cosmopolitan, New York Times, Revlon, Clairol, and L’Oreal. 

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He received prominent coverage in photography publications such as Graphis, Popular Photography, American Photographer, and Photo District News. He was the first American photographer to incorporate photo studio computing technology. He remained active in the field through exhibits, design awards, articles, lecturing, and teaching, particularly at NYC's New School. He remained a technical consultant to Polaroid and to the president of Fuji Film. 

 

He co-directed “Heat” with famed marine geophysicist, Dr. Kathy Crane, an educational science documentary on the Earth's geothermal energy processes, funded by the Charles Lindburg Foundation. 

 

His photographs and interviews have appeared in a multitude of media. He has written on photography for the New York Times, lectured nationally, and led intensive, single-session seminars on expressive visual methodology with Minor White and independently upon his mentor's passing. He founded and directs an international fragrance & personal-care, luxury product company under his brand name.

 

He currently resides in a cloistered university town raising his teen daughter, a dancing commitment of the heart, while completing his photography manual, "Real Views", lessons in heightened visual awareness, a continuance of Minor White's expressive seeing methodologies. 

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Make certain your teacher holds vision, not hardware. 

 

The photographic appliance held in your hand does not define your path into an expressive, communicating photographer, it is your eye alone, your vision, your "inner landscape" which shapes imaging magic. Even that slice-of-bread-thin phone glued to our person does picture miracles...if you tell it so! The long-held delusion that the machine makes the art is a grasp of security not readily loosened. Only in rare, highly demanding circumstances of light and place which professional equipment is required, such as delightful bird photos.

 

Smartphone cameras are in some models surpassing professional cameras, expanding out of wide-angle lenses only into the medium telephoto lengths so necessary for portraiture as well as high-quality zooming. Technical features such as post-snap, variable depth of field, the extraordinary Apple iPhone, "Portrait" mode, is now an intriguing jump ahead of regular cameras.

 

I experience total image satisfaction from either phone or fully professional camera, yet with the phone always in my pocket, frequent opportunities are not lost! 

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Retroactively, this golden photo age of photography also unleashes a curse in billions of daily, image harvesting, and upload. Such profoundly impersonal and unconscious, Like-button craving is curatorially referred to as "Situational" photography. The sole snapshot characteristic is that you were simply there and pressed the button! Something akin to the internet media's being famous for being famous. 

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The prime camera apparatus from the invention of photography and up to 1930's appearance of the portable 35mm Leica, was the view camera. A massive operation where you work under a black, light-proof cloth hood, taking a single shot at a time, commonly from 4x5 inches in size typically up to 8x10. The glass screen is a beautiful, fine resolution, and up-side-down image, even so brilliant under the hood in bright sun. No pocket device, a "snap" here requires at least 20 minutes, if not an hour, of set-up: 30-65 pounds of gear! 

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As you can imagine, your image framing -- the photo taken -- is no snapshot, rather deeply deliberate, absorbing.  I know this well, having obsessively once lugged such across the entire Sahara Desert! For which I should have packed 200 rolls of Kodachrome to feed my 35mm camera...which ended up the photographic hero of the trek. And by the way, an Apple iPad's observational detail is a nearly exact equivalent to the view camera in observational screen size: much brighter in all conditions without the black hood, not up-side-down, and about 64 pounds lighter!  I, for one, do not laugh when I see a tourist hoist an iPad for a shot: the essence of art in imaging is a clear, precise view of content and framing. Which you will deeply appreciate in these lessons.

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A mastery of personally expressive photography blossoms from the now-minimal "camera craft" needed in these digital days of advanced image automaton. Your basic, trained discipline for seeing as the camera does is now wrapped in the technological gift that 99% of the technicality is done for you.

 

From a basic, one-lesson set of hardware essentials, we immediately move into a personal mastery of seeing awareness. Putting our eyes and our self-aware soul together in a set of rigorous "visual gym" exercises. They work! At the first seeing lesson, you'll begin to find a sense of "inner landscape", a visual consciousness we also call "equivalence", seeing as the camera sees and in turn directing our sense creatively.

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This is an abrupt, psychological departure from the long-held strictures of painting composition. This is what you consciously see, and photographically make, when both realms reflect your vision at the moment of pressing the button. Personal expression; individual creativity. The Biblical beauty expressed in, "Let there be light.", becomes a transformational summary of your newly heightened, visual awareness.

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Come check out with a single lesson. Your eyes will open!  These are practical and utilitarian methods, tested by thousands of students, transformed into singular expressiveness from Minor White's educational dedication, as was I.

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