A flexible approach

Rip Hopkins's photographic style is wonderfully scatty. His body of work is a healthy mish-mash of genres, techniques, formats and moods; in colour and black and white, including both reportage and staged photography. But a consistent thread throughout is his penchant for portraiture. And somewhat off-kilter portraiture at that. He accumulates individual portraits to form a series that, as a whole, represents an entire community - a circus in Riga for example. Hopkins captures members of this Latvian troupe completely out of context, as with 18-year-old gymnast Olga Guseva (2003) above – and clearly revels in the incongruity that he creates.