Dennis Hopper
The Lost Album
I first met Dennis Hopper to interview him for a film he had directed, Out of the Blue. He lived up to his bad boy reputation. His hotel suite had somehow been transformed into a dark denizen of excess. The film is dark too, yet brave beyond words. From his varied work I always knew he had a creative force driving him even in the throes of one addiction or another. I found him to be vulnerable and boy-like.
The show of his work entitled Lost Album at the Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles reinforces his unique ability to capture and make art with a camera. He shot for a decade in the sixties taking his camera with him everywhere. The images from Lost Album are an incredible display of his life and art in that period. From the Hells Angels to Martin Luther King we get to view his innate instincts. This show is a re-creation of Hopper‘s show from 1970 at the Fort Worth Art Center Museum and the exact images form that exhibition. These photographs (over 400 images) were found among his belongings after his death in 2010.
This collection is very revealing in his travel and life choices of where he wanted to be, and where he needed to belong. He was shooting Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, marching in Selma, doing portraits of Paul Newman and Jane Fonda, and creating the amazing images of torn posters (below).
I found him to have a wonderful and haunting sensitive side. I feel the same way viewing the images from Lost Album. His photography is under appreciated but shouldn’t be. Evidently this is only a small portion of his work with a camera and we can only hope more will be revealed.
