Roger Hopgood

The Image Awry Roger Hopgood

The Image Awry represents the photographic work produced by British artist Roger Hopgood from around 2000 to 2010. A key element of Hopgood's work has been a theorization of landscape; it was present in the work he produced during the 1980s, following completion of his MA at the Slade School of Art, and it can be found too in his PhD research at Goldsmiths College, which focused on the picturesque photograph.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, digital manipulation became an increasingly important tool in the development of post-photography - an approach to photographic art that bypassess the medium's 'duty' to articulate the single instant. This book focuses on work produced during this period. Using digital assemblage, Roger Hopgood's work explores notions of landscape; but as landscape 'after the fact', there is no reverence for nature and the pastoral. The locations presented to us resonate not with a spirit of place but with intertextual reference. Principally, we are reminded of cinema and popular fiction. The collective works in The Image Awry ponder landscape in the digital age and deploy digital construction. We might see this work as a step towards what might be termed the'post-indexical' landscape. Yet a continuity with the past remains; the picturesque view (historical and contemporary) is at the core of Hopgood's premise, and in probing the scenic view and its attendant vantage point, the politics of landscape are brought to the fore.

The Image Awry is richly illustrated in full colour, and contains three essays discussing the work. Two of these are by Hopgood and the third is an introductory essay by John Taylor, author of Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist's Imagination.