Dennis Hopper's Life as a Photographer: The 1961-1967 Archive

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Collage of Dennis Hopper photos, including a shirtless Paul Newman in net shadows and a Jane Fonda arching a bow on a beach; title text at top

Most people know Dennis Hopper as the actor who co-wrote, directed, and starred in Easy Rider in 1969, or from any number of roles that followed across five decades. Fewer know that in the years before Easy Rider, when Hollywood had largely decided he was too difficult to work with, Hopper spent his time doing something else entirely. He had a Nikon slung around his neck almost constantly, and he was photographing everything: film sets, art galleries, civil rights marches, bullfights, Harlem street corners, biker couples, and the faces of people who would shortly become some of the most famous names in American culture.

The six-year body of work he produced between 1961 and 1967 is one of the more remarkable accidental archives in the history of American photography. It didn't surface in its full form until 2009, when a limited collector's edition was published by Taschen. A general release followed in 2011, and a smaller second edition appeared in 2018. By then Hopper had been dead for a year, but the photographs had finally found the audience they deserved.

How It Started: A Birthday Camera and a Piece of Advice from James Dean

The camera came from his first wife, Brooke Hayward, who spent her last $351 on a Nikon for him. The impulse to use it came from James Dean, with whom Hopper had appeared in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant in 1955 and 1956. Hopper had mentioned to Dean that he wanted to direct films one day, and Dean told him to take up photography to train his eye. Hopper filed that away. When the camera arrived, he put Dean's advice to work.

Dennis Hopper, Natalie Wood, and James Dean in Rebel Without s Cause. — Dennis Hopper, Natalie Wood, and James Dean in *Rebel Without s Cause.*

The timing of all this matters. By 1961, Hopper's acting career had stalled badly. His reputation for clashing with directors, most notoriously with Henry Hathaway on the set of From Hell to Texas in 1958, had made him difficult to cast. He wasn't blacklisted exactly, but the major studios had cooled on him significantly. So while his contemporaries were building their screen careers, Hopper was out on the streets with a Nikon F 35mm, shooting whatever he found in front of him. He got the nickname 'The Tourist' from his friends, because the camera was always there, always pointing at something.

Double Standard and the LA Landscape

His most famous single photograph, Double Standard, was taken in 1961 at the junction of Melrose, Doheny and Santa Monica in Los Angeles. It shows two Shell gas station signs rising above the intersection, slightly out of alignment with each other, the geometry of commercial America rendered strange and slightly ominous by the angle and framing. It's the kind of image that sits comfortably alongside the work of Ed Ruscha, who Hopper was photographing in his studio around the same time. Both men were looking at the Los Angeles landscape and seeing something that the rest of the art world hadn't quite caught up with yet.

Hopper was embedded in the LA art scene in a way that was unusual for a Hollywood actor. He and Hayward lived at 1712 North Crescent Heights, a house that became a gathering point for artists, musicians, and filmmakers. He photographed Jasper Johns there. He documented Andy Warhol at Warhol's first West Coast show. He shot Ed Ruscha in 1964 in a portrait that captures something of the cool, slightly removed quality that ran through Ruscha's own work. These weren't celebrity snapshots. Hopper was paying close attention, and it shows.

Tina Turner, Paul Newman, and the Access Money Can't Buy

Being an actor, even a currently-out-of-favour one, opened doors that a conventional documentary photographer couldn't have walked through. Hopper photographed Tina Turner in the studio with Ike during the recording sessions that led to the 1966 album River Deep, Mountain High, for which he also shot the cover art. He photographed Paul Newman on set. He was there when Jane Fonda married Roger Vadim in Las Vegas and got a photograph of that too. He documented Warhol's Factory crowd, the Hell's Angels, hippies, and in quieter moments, complete strangers on streets in Harlem and Mexico and Peru.

Writer Terry Southern, who would later co-write Easy Rider with Hopper, profiled him in Better Homes and Gardens in the mid-1960s as a photographer to watch. That's a sentence that requires a moment to sit with: Dennis Hopper, the wild man of Hollywood, profiled in Better Homes and Gardens as a serious photographer. The photographs were starting to appear in Vogue. He was shooting for magazines. This was a real secondary career, not a hobby.

Selma, 1965

The most politically charged images in the archive came from Alabama. In 1965, Hopper travelled to Selma to take part in the third civil rights march to Montgomery, led by Martin Luther King Jr. He was 28 years old and went as both participant and photographer. His photographs of King on that march, and of the crowd of around fifty thousand people who had gathered, were published and represent some of the more significant documentary images from the civil rights movement to have been taken by someone outside the world of professional photojournalism.

His friend Stewart Stern, who was also on the march, described the experience in detail: the crowd sitting on the ground, King exhausted and almost falling asleep on his feet, the National Guard with fixed bayonets, and the ugly hostility from officials directed at the white marchers who had come with the civil rights demonstrators. Hopper was in the middle of all of it with his camera.

Biker Couple and the Road America Was About to Take

One of the earliest photographs in the archive, and one of the most reproduced, is Biker Couple, taken in 1961. It shows a man and woman on a motorcycle, caught in a moment that manages to look simultaneously documentary and cinematic. The image predates Easy Rider by eight years. Looking at it now, knowing what Hopper would go on to make, it's tempting to read it as a premonition. Whether or not that's fair to the photograph, it does show that Hopper's eye was drawn very early to the counterculture figures who would define the decade.

That early attention to bikers, hippies, and the social edges of American life was a consistent thread through the six years of photographs. Hopper wandered Harlem. He watched bullfights in Tijuana with what one critic described as fascination. He photographed cemeteries in Durango. He shot a Harlem billboard in 1962 that has the same attention to vernacular commercial signage as Double Standard. Wherever he was, the camera went.

The Taschen Book and Why It Took So Long

The 2009 limited edition published by Taschen was a remarkable object. Compiled by Hopper and gallerist Tony Shafrazi, it ran to 544 pages, measured 30 by 33 centimetres, and weighed 5.5 kilograms. Only 1,500 copies were made, each signed by Hopper himself. An Art Edition included a gelatin print of Biker Couple. The general release edition that followed in 2011 made the work accessible, and a smaller 2018 reprint extended its availability further.

More than a third of the photographs in the collection had never been published before. Hopper had been sitting on this archive for decades. The reason it stayed private for so long is probably simple: Easy Rider happened, and then the chaos of the 1970s happened, and Hopper spent the next thirty years being Dennis Hopper the actor rather than Dennis Hopper the photographer. The pictures waited.

What makes the archive unusual is the combination of access and instinct. Hopper could get into rooms that most photographers couldn't, because he was a recognisable face in the worlds he was moving through. But the photographs don't look like the work of someone coasting on access. They look like the work of someone paying real attention, which is exactly what James Dean had told him to do.