Showing up too early for a Rolling Stones shoot has proved fruitless for many a young photographer, sent away with a sneer from a certain famous pair of lips. For John “Hoppy” Hopkins however, it was the beginning of something big.
When he arrived to take some pix of the band one day in the summer of 1964, the former physicist and the recalcitrant Stones frontman hit it off. Hopkins later recounted that Jagger said he was the only photographer whom he’d ever allowed to take his picture before lunch.
The moody result, above, is included in Hopkins’ genius new book, From the Hip: Photographs by John “Hoppy” Hopkins 1960-66. Along the way Hopkins, who ditched a promising career as nuclear physicist to become a prominent counterculture figure, snapped everyone from Malcolm X and Louis Armstrong to heroin users and Hell’s Angels, but we think that first Stones shoot said it best.
—J.P.S.
