When he was 18 years old Dennis Hopper started taking photos. Between 1961 and 1967, at his most prolific, he took 18, 000 pictures but stopped taking them altogether when he was 31 – the same year that he wrote and directed Easy Rider. And in many ways much of the work in Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album feels like the ultimate research project for his directorial debut.
We may know him as an iconic counter-cultural actor, but Hopper was also a painter and sculptor as well as photographer and he moved seamlessly between mediums – and worlds. His photographic subjects – Hollywood actors, rock stars, bands, artists (on both the West and East coasts), hippies and bikers – were also often his friends too. Hopper was at the epicentre of a world in the midst of the most dramatic shifts – sexual and social, political and cultural and his photos are an amazing personal diary of a time when he says the world “was on fire.” And in this show it’s all too clear how vital his creative outlets were – as a quote from Hopper says near the start of the show: “I never made a cent from these photos. They cost me money but they kept me alive.”
The 400 vintage prints that make up the Royal Academy show were selected and boxed up by Hopper and then discovered after his death in 2010. So not only has the show been to some extent curated by Hopper, but the Academy has also strived to show the prints exactly as Hopper displayed them with no frames and very simply mounted onto card. The only additions for this show are the glass vitrines that surround them. Most are small scale prints which forces you to get up close to see each picture. So you will definitely want to try and see this show without too many crowds – which will be tricky as it’s bound to be a hugely popular. But it’s also one not to miss.
