By Delia Rose Gibbs
Contributing Writer

By the time Marcia Lamont Hopkins entered Kindergarten, she had a hunch about herself: she was an artist. And she was right. She’s spent her life drawing and painting, she once worked in graphic design, and for over forty years, photography has been the enduring center of her creative life.

A West Coast native, Hopkins received a BFA from the California College of the Arts, where she studied film and photography. In both her early artistic pursuits and her professional work —including her time as a photographer for UC Berkeley — she found happiness in darkrooms. She loved the mixing of chemicals and coaxing images to emerge. She almost always developed her images in black and white, waiting with bated breath to see what each print would reveal. 

In the early 1980s, Hopkins and her then-husband moved to Kentucky, leaving her without things that she had taken for granted in California: access to a darkroom became scarce, and the number of the paying photography opportunities she was aware of shrank. 

It was lucky that around the same time Hopkins found herself without a darkroom, photography was entering a new era. As digital cameras and new means to edit images became more widely available, Hopkins embraced the emerging technologies.

“I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t make images,” she said. “I’d be a very sad person.” 

In Lexington, Hopkins started thinking about going back to school. She came from a family of PhDs, her husband was in the midst of a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Kentucky, and, as she put it, she liked the idea of having one of those degrees herself. 

She considered medical school but, as the mother of a young child, decided that counseling psychology, while still demanding, was a more practical path. She made a good choice. About counseling individuals and couples, she says, “I get a lot out of it. I really enjoy connecting with people on a deep, personal level.”

An introvert, Hopkins has found that helping people work through hardship charges her emotional batteries, while the flexibility of her private practice has allowed her to remain devoted to her artistic work. 

“Empathy is a parallel [between photography and counseling],” she said. “I have a lot of empathy [for what’s in front of me], whether that’s a tree or a dog or a person.” 

Before I interviewed Hopkins, I spent some time clicking around her website and got particularly drawn in by this image from the series titled “Secret Garden.” 

At first glance, the scene felt, if not ominous, then at least faintly eerie or somber — this cluster of figures leaning as if drawn forward by a magnet. 

My mind began to supply its own explanations: daytime sleepwalkers summoned by something powerful or perhaps witnesses gathered in the aftermath of something unsettling.

As I kept looking, incongruences in my story began to reveal themselves: I saw pleasantries being exchanged by people in khakis, a camera slung over a shoulder. I started to think this was not a group waiting for a witch hunt to get under way, or a debriefing after one. “These are hikers,” I decided, “pausing to talk about that glorious tree.”

When I asked Hopkins about the image, she confirmed as much and told me she used a Nikon FX to shoot it. The sense of “trudging” I projected onto the scene came from her own manipulation of the image. In the original photograph, the tree was crooked, but the people were standing on level ground. Using Adobe Photoshop to straighten the tree, she shifted the whole geometry of the moment, pitching the human figures forward just enough to make the mind falter. 

The sense that things are a little out of place or not quite what they first seem reoccurs throughout many of the images Hopkins created during the era of the above “not a witch hunt” image. 

Here, for example, in “Irish Field,” my eye was drawn first to the soulful bovine subjects, got lost for a bit in the lushness of their surroundings, then settled at last on a pelican.