With “Another Country”, Rip Hopkins offers, through 31 portraits of families, a personal and documentary work on the reality and fantasies of British expatriates in France.
Exiled from the United Kingdom, Rip Hopkins confronts his own origins and his intimate relationship with France.
A testimony that evokes the question of identity and belonging to a country, real or imagined, in the context of a society undergoing the effect of globalization.
Tryptic and dreamlike, the images of Rip Hopkins penetrate the deepest layers of our inner heart.
“My work focuses on the British of France, those who turned their backs on their native country to settle in the Dordogne. It shows the life they have built, the identity they have acquired and what they think of the country they have left. But the implicit message of these images and the strength that pushes me to take an interest in this expatriate world, is the exploration of my own motivations, I who live in France and who spent most of my adult years there. There is my rejection of Britain, my sense of social maladjustment – the idea that I am nowhere home in Britain and the fact that I have reinvented and given myself an ambition. Now, as time passes, I am less satisfied with being a stranger, and more and more attracted by these British values which were given me in my childhood. I’m afraid that one day I will have to return to Britain. ”
Rip Hopkins, 2010
Rip Hopkins – Another country
Festival Photographique l’Œil Urbain
April 5 – May 19
Corbeil-Essonnes
