Dennis Hopper established his reputation as a cult director with Easy Rider (1969), while maintaining his reputation as an edgy character actor with gritty performances in The American Friend (1977), Apocalypse Now (1979), Blue Velvet (1986), and Hoosiers (1986). Before his rise to Hollywood stardom, he captured the establishment–busting spirit of the 1960s in photographs that travel from Los Angeles to Harlem to Tijuana, and which portray iconic figures including Tina Turner, Andy Warhol, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Exhibited at Gagosian New York in 2013, The Lost Album in its entirety comprises over 400 black and white photographs taken between 1961—when his first wife Brooke Hayward gave him a Nikon camera for his birthday—and 1967.
Dennis Hopper was born in 1936 in Dodge City, Kansas, and died in 2010 in Venice, California. Recent solo exhibitions include “American Pictures 1961–1967,” MAK Center, Los Angeles (2000); “International Traveling Retrospective Exhibition,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2001, traveled to Mak Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna); “Dennis Hopper and the New Hollywood,” Australian Centre For The Moving Image, Melbourne (2009); “Double Standard,” The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2010); “L.A. and Friends—Photographs from the 60's,” Art District, Le Royal Monceau, Paris (2011); “En el camino,” Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain (2013); “The Lost Album,” Royal Academy of Arts, London (2014); and “Part of Being an Artist: The Dennis Hopper Collection, Selected Artwork and Ephemera,” Hugh Hefner Exhibition Hall and Cinematic Arts Gallery, University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, Los Angeles (2014). His photographs are included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.
