Most people know Dennis Hopper as the actor who directed Easy Rider, the man who descended into a decade of chaos and came back from Apocalypse Now changed. Fewer know that between 1961 and 1967, before Easy Rider made him a legend, Hopper spent six years pointing a Nikon at everything he could find — and made roughly 18,000 images that constitute one of the most vital photographic records of 1960s America in existence.
The camera was a gift from his first wife, Brooke Hayward. He had been blacklisted from Hollywood after a dispute with director Henry Hathaway and had nothing but time. He picked up the camera the way some people pick up a habit, and within months it had become the central project of his life.
The Lost Album
Hopper selected around 400 of these images for an exhibition at the Fort Worth Art Center Museum in 1970 — vintage prints he produced himself, mounted on cardboard, numbered on the back in his own handwriting. Then he packed them into five crates and essentially forgot about them. They sat, undisturbed, for decades.
After his death in 2010, the crates were rediscovered. The exhibition traveled to the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, the Royal Academy in London, and Gagosian galleries around the world. Audiences who expected actor-tourist snapshots found instead a body of work that critics compared — seriously, not as flattery — to Walker Evans and Robert Frank.
What He Photographed
Hopper photographed Andy Warhol at his first West Coast show in 1963. He photographed Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights March from Selma to Montgomery. He photographed Tina Turner in the studio, Jane Fonda marrying Roger Vadim in Las Vegas, Paul Newman on a film set. He photographed Hell’s Angels and hippies, the street life of Harlem, the landscapes of the American Southwest, and the ordinary accumulation of signs and billboards and parking lots that made up the visual culture of a country in transition.
The photographs of celebrities are unguarded in a way that professional portraits rarely are. Hopper had access because he was one of them, and the people he photographed trusted him not to make them look foolish. What he made instead was something rarer: images of famous people being human, caught in the middle of thinking or laughing or not doing anything in particular.
His most iconic image might be Double Standard (1961) — a photograph of two Standard Oil signs visible through an automobile windshield, the American landscape framed by American glass. Ed Ruscha used it as the cover image for his second solo exhibition in 1964.
The Philosophy
Hopper said of his photographs: “I think of my photographs as ‘found’ paintings because I don’t crop them, I don’t manipulate them or anything. So they’re like ‘found’ objects to me.” This was the influence of his friendships with the assemblage artists of the Los Angeles scene — Ed Kienholz, Wallace Berman, the entire circle of Ferus Gallery — who understood that meaning could be found in the overlooked and discarded rather than constructed from scratch.
He was also, by his own admission, shy. “I was a compulsive shooter back then. I was very shy, and it was a lot easier for me to communicate if I had a camera between me and other people.” The camera as social prosthesis, as a license to look — this is a confession shared by many photographers who are not actors and have never been on a film set.
The Recognition
Wim Wenders, not given to extravagant praise, said of Hopper: “If he’d only been a photographer, he’d be one of the great photographers of the twentieth century.” His work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It was largely invisible during his lifetime, hidden in crates and eclipsed by the louder noise of his film career.
The photographs have outlasted the noise. They always do.