„I never made a cent from these photos. They cost me money but kept me alive. These are my photos. I started at eighteen taking pictures. I stopped at thirty-one. These represent the years from twenty-five to thirty-one, 1961 to 1967. I didn’t crop my photos. They are full frame natural light Tri-X. I went under contract to Warner Brothers at eighteen. I directed Easy Rider at thirty-one. I married Brooke at twenty-five and got a good camera and could afford to take pictures and print them. They were the only creative outlet I had for these years until ‚Easy Rider‘. I never carried a camera again.“

Dennis Hopper, 1986

He was a legend. More than four hundred photos came to light after Hopper’s death. He had selected them for his first photography exhibition in 1970 at the Fort Worth Art Center Museum. They show signs of wear: fingerprints, scratches, discoloration, a frayed corner or tiny dent. Mounted on cardboard, numbered on the back with notes in Hopper’s handwriting, they were hung directly on the wall from small wooden strips without frames or glass. The hanging in the Martin-Gropius-Bau is based on the original installation of 1970.

The vintage prints, in portrait and landscape format, are all of a similar size, ca. 24 x 16 cm; twenty of them are in a larger format (ca. 33 x 23 cm). Of the 429 Hopper chose for his first exhibition, eleven are believed lost; they are replaced here by new prints, which will be clearly indicated. The images have a legendary quality. Spontaneous, intimate, poetic, unabashedly political and keenly observed, they document an exciting epoch, its protagonists and milieus. These photographs reflect the atmosphere of an era, being outstanding testimonials to America’s dynamic cultural scene in the 1960s. On the viewer they exercise an irresistible attraction, bearing him away on a journey into the past, often into his own history.

Many of these pictures are icons, such as the portraits of Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Paul Newman and Jane Fonda. They also cover a wide range of subjects. Dennis Hopper is interested in everything. Wherever he happens to be, whether in Los Angeles, New York, London, Mexico or Peru, he takes in his surroundings with empathy, enthusiasm and intense curiosity. He seeks and savours the “essential moment”, capturing the celebrities and types of his time with the camera: actors, artists, musicians, his family, bikers and hippies. He leaves an impressive photographic record of the “street life” of Harlem, of cemeteries in Mexico, and of bullfights in Tijuana. Hopper accompanies Martin Luther King Jr. on the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and, in images of great beauty and serenity, he converts the every day life and the neglected into a picture of beauty and silence as if converting Abstract Expressionism from the language of painting into that of photography.

Dennis Hopper, born 1936 in Dodge City, Kansas, died 2010 in Venice, California, a cult figure, was an actor, director and author and sometimes all three at once, as in „Easy Rider“ (1969), „The Last Movie“ (1971) or „Out of the Blue“ (1980). As a collector, Dennis Hopper played an influential role in Los Angeles’ youthful art scene as represented by Ed Kienholz, Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell or Wallace Berman. This made him a link between the Californian avant-garde and Hollywood’s film world. He was also a photographer, taking countless pictures in the relatively brief period between 1961 and 1967.

“The necessity to make these photos and paintings came from a real place – a place of desperation and solitude – with the hope that someday these objects, paintings, and photos would be seen filling the void I was feeling.”

Dennis Hopper, 2001

„The Lost Album – Vintage Photographs of the 1960s“

Martin-Gropius-Bau
Niederkirchnerstraße 7
10963 Berlin

Open: Wednesday to Monday, 10 am – 7 pm, Tuesday closed, til December 19, 2012.

www.gropiusbau.de

Photos:
James Brown, 1966, Location: USA. © The Dennis Hopper Trust, Courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust

Guy with 5 hogs, 1961-67, Location: USA. © The Dennis Hopper Trust, Courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust

Andy Warhol and Members of The Factory (Gregory Markopoulos, Taylor Mead, Gerard Malanga, Jack Smith), 1963, Location: in The Factory, NYC, NY USA. © The Dennis Hopper Trust, Courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust

Andy Warhol, Henry Geldzahler, David Hockney, and Jeff Goodman, 1963, Location: USA. © The Dennis Hopper Trust, Courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust

Paul Newman, 1964, Location: Malibu, Ca, USA. © The Dennis Hopper Trust, Courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust