James Hopkirk and Gabrielle Motola: Photographer Profiles

James Hopkirk and Gabrielle Motola both work in a form that sits between photography and reporting, where portraits are gathered alongside interviews and the text is as much the work as the pictures. Hopkirk has spent years documenting austerity in one South London borough. Motola spent two years in Iceland making a book about gender, work and trust. They shared a London talk programme on 2 June 2019.

James Hopkirk

James Hopkirk is a London photojournalist. He came to photography from journalism, having started on a local newspaper and then worked at The Sunday Times, at MTV and as editor of the arts charity IdeasTap. He graduated from the MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication in 2016.

South London Stories

His long-running project is South London Stories, which documents the effect of austerity and welfare cuts on people living in Lambeth. He began the work in 2015 while still studying.

In 2017 the project won him a Mead Fellowship from University of the Arts London, worth £7,000. UAL's announcement describes the work as made with seven specialist charities supporting vulnerable groups, and says the fellowship would fund a website, an exhibition and professional design help. An early stage of the work was run with the Brixton Advice Centre, which published his own account of the plan in January 2016: a year of photography and interviews, with images and case studies posted as they were made.

The method matters here. Hopkirk works through advice centres, foodbanks and day centres rather than approaching people cold, which gives him access to continuing situations rather than single incidents.

Gabrielle Motola

Gabrielle Motola is a photographic artist, writer and educator who has worked in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Her own site sets out her projects and her teaching.

An Equal Difference

An Equal Difference, published in 2016, was made over two years in Iceland in the years after the 2008 financial collapse. It combines portraits with interviews and Motola's own writing, and looks at how a small society renegotiated gender, work and trust. The subjects include politicians, scientists, artists and educators. The book was funded by a Kickstarter campaign, which is a common route for a first photobook with no trade publisher behind it.

Her other work includes Henge to Henge, a 2018 photo essay about a motorbike journey from Stonehenge to the Arctic henge in Iceland, and Elūl, a hand-bound first edition of 100 published in 2025. She co-directs the Photobook Club Collective, which supports independent publishing, and advises artists on editioning, provenance and pricing.

Photography with text attached

What links these two bodies of work is that neither is only a set of pictures. Hopkirk writes case studies; Motola prints interviews beside her portraits. That choice has consequences a photographer should think through before committing to it.

• It changes the consent conversation. Someone who agrees to be photographed has not automatically agreed to be quoted, and a project built on testimony needs that settled early.
• It changes the editing. A picture that works alone may be redundant once the words are there.
• It changes who funds it. Projects with a written component sit well with fellowships and arts grants, which is how the Mead Fellowship and a crowdfunding campaign came to pay for these two.
• It changes where it ends up. Text-led work tends to become a book or a sited exhibition rather than a magazine spread, which is why so many long documentary projects now appear first as small-edition photobooks rather than in the press.

Other photographers working across text and image are listed in our speakers index, and the previous talks archive covers the London programmes of 2017 to 2020. See also the events archive for related profiles.

This site is an independent journal. It is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group, with its venue, or with the photographers written about here. Information on this page comes from the published sources linked above.