Dennis Hopper’s Quiet Vision of Nineteen-Sixties Hollywood | The New Yorker

Dennis Hopper’s photography archive—the Hopper Art Trust—resides in an office on the top floor of a squat building on the Sunset Strip, in Los Angeles. Its neighbors are insurance and mortgage offices, and for the most part it shares their appearance: filing cabinets here, a desk there, a wall of bookshelves with plastic binders. The binders are filled with contact sheets containing upward of eighteen thousand images that Hopper created with his Nikon F camera between 1961 and 1967, when he was just another actor with a stalled-out career, in the years leading up to “Easy Rider,” which he starred in and directed. That movie, released in 1969, would make him something more than a Hollywood star; for a time, he was a pop-culture deity. And, for whatever reason, it also turned him into a former photographer. With a few exceptions (including an ill-advised Hustler shoot, in the eighties), Hopper rarely picked up a camera again for the rest of his life.