"Reportage for Picture Post in the 1950s was at the heart of the career of Thurston Hopkins, who has died aged 101. His long professional life also included book illustration, COMMERCIAL PHOTOGRAPHY and teaching – before painting finally took over. The hallmarks of Hopkins’s style as a photographer mirrored those of the news magazine: a strong story, told in “as many shades of black and white as possible”. His signature features began with The Cats of London (1951) and closed with LIFE IN Liverpool (1956), which was spiked by Picture Post’s owner, Edward Hulton, in deference to Liverpool’s leaders who protested at the depiction of poverty, misery and deprivation in their city’s slums. (This tendency to kill challenging stories was to cost one editor – my father, Tom Hopkinson – his job when, in 1950, he refused to pull a feature on the Korean war by the photographer Bert Hardy and the writer James Cameron.) Hopkins’s work on cats and Liverpool reflected the popular and political aspects of Picture Post’s mission: two million readers were as likely to be interested in the pets and strays on the bomb sites of the capital as in destitute Merseyside families. Hopkins’s own background was very different. He was born in south London and, although his parents, Sybil (nee Bateley) and Robert Thurston Hopkins, christened him Godfrey, all but close friends and relatives called him Thurston. His father was a bank cashier and writer of ghost stories, topographical studies of Sussex, Cornwall and London, true crime tales and biographies of his near contemporaries Oscar Wilde, HG Wells and Rudyard Kipling. Hopkins's photographs of Liverpool slums were spiked by the owner of Picture Post in deference to the city's leaders, who protested at the depiction of deprivation. Hopkins’s photographs of Liverpool slums were spiked by the owner of Picture Post in deference to the city’s leaders, who protested at the depiction of deprivation. Photograph: Thurston Hopkins/Getty Images From St Joseph’s Salesian school at Burwash, near Kipling’s home in East Sussex, he went to Montpelier college, Brighton, and Brighton College of Art, where he studied graphic illustration and was instructed by Morgan Rendle to “watch those shadows: they give black-and-white illustration weight and balance where it is most needed”. Hopkins deliberately applied this “leitmotif in my visual thinking, not only when I was making pen-and-ink drawings for provincial newspapers, but also when I began using a camera”. The abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 put an end to an early job in graphics, adding decorative frames to portraits of the king. It was a time when newspapers were moving from illustrations to photographs, and Thurston discovered “the camera paid better than the brush”. But he found his first Goerz-Anschütz heavy and awkward, and disliked the dog-eat-dog practices of Fleet Street that he encountered on joining the Photo Press agency that year. The launch of Picture Post in 1938 opened new doors. Conceived by the Hungarian émigré Stefan Lorant, the former editor of illustrated weeklies in Berlin and Munich, the magazine featured images by the many photographers soon exiled in Paris and London, among them Tim Gidal, Brassaï, Felix Man, Kurt Hutton and Gerti Deutsch. They introduced a fresh international outlook, firsthand experience of the rise and spread of nazism, and a new photographic genre; first called a unified photo report, it soon evolved into the picture story, photo ESSAY or editorial feature. Writer and photographer went out on a story together, working as colleagues, not competitors. Hopkins had found a creative base inhabited by kindred spirits. Many new photographers arrived with their Leicas – “the first camera I can recall handling without a certain feeling of distaste,” the technology-averse Hopkins later recalled, adding that “I loved the absence of the requirement for technical perfection.” Regarding it as fundamental to the astounding success of Picture Post, he affirmed: “I take the rather unpopular view that words and pictures need one another.” In 1940 Hopkins joined the RAF Photographic Unit and acquired his own Leica, serving in Italy and the Middle East until 1945. His desire to join Picture Post was fired by finding copies “in every tent and service club overseas”." http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/30/thurston-hopkins
