'In Dreams. Scenes from the Archive' adds to our understanding of Dennis Hopper’s personal vision as an artist by tracing the threads of Hopper’s life through photography, and connecting his roles as an actor, husband, father, and photographer.

'In Dreams' eschews Hopper’s iconic stand-alone images and instead looks to distill the archive into a connected set of photographs that offer new impressions and stories. Themes emerge, visual rhymes are made, and characters come and go while the reader is invited along for the journey. Hopper’s photographic output was especially concentrated in the ‘60s, a period in which his film career had cooled off. During these years Hopper’s primary creative outlet was his photography. The Nikon camera his wife Brooke Hayward gifted him hung so prominently around his neck that friends jokingly called him ‘the tourist.’

While 'In Dreams', which references Roy Orbison’s song by the same name made famous in Blue Velvet, includes appearances by famous faces, they are intimately intertwined with Hopper’s peripatetic life and his everyday use of the camera. Hopper was very much an insider — at ease with celebrities and artists of his day — but this new conversation with his archive shows that, like many photographers, Hopper was also distinctly an outsider. Famous himself, but also an observer: it’s this unique duality that allowed Hopper to view the world in his unique way.

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The Many Worlds of Dennis Hopper. A reluctant icon captures a decade of cultural transformation

During the 1960s, Dennis Hopper carried a camera everywhere—on film sets and locations, at parties, in diners, bars and galleries, driving on freeways and walking on political marches. He photographed movie idols, pop stars, writers, artists, girlfriends, and complete strangers. Along the way, he captured some of the most intriguing moments of his generation with a keen and intuitive eye. A reluctant icon at the epicenter of that decade’s cultural upheaval, Hopper documented the likes of Tina Turner in the studio, Andy Warhol at his first West Coast show, Paul Newman on set, and Martin Luther King during the Civil Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

From a selection of photographs compiled by Hopper and gallerist Tony Shafrazi, this extensive volume, finally back in print in a new edition, distils the essence of Hopper’s prodigious photographic career. Also included are introductory essays by Shafrazi and legendary West Coast art pioneer Walter Hopps, as well as an extensive biography and new afterword by journalist Jessica Hundley. With excerpts from Victor Bockris’s interviews of Hopper’s famous subjects, friends, and family, this volume revives an unprecedented exploration of the life and mind of one of America’s most fascinating personalities.

The photographer

Dennis Hopper (1936–2010) was an acclaimed artist, actor, screenwriter, and director who first impressed audiences with his performances in Rebel Without A Cause (1955) and Giant (1956). He changed the face of American cinema with Easy Rider (1969), which he co-wrote, directed, and starred in. Hopper went on to act in hundreds of memorable films and television shows, including Apocalypse Now (1979), Blue Velvet (1986), Hoosiers (1986), True Romance (1993), Basquiat (1997), Elegy (2008), and the TV series Crash (2008). Hopper began painting as a child and started taking photos in 1961 after his then-wife Brooke Hayward gave him a 35 mm Nikon camera for his birthday. His paintings and photography have been exhibited all over the world, including the recent retrospective, “Dennis Hopper and the New Hollywood” in Paris. Dennis Hopper passed away May 29, 2010, in Venice, CA.

The contributing authors

An Englishman who moved to New York in 1973 and became connected to Andy Warhol, the Factory, and Interview, Victor Bockris has written books on Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, Keith Richards, William S. Burroughs, Patti Smith, and Muhammad Ali.

Walter Hopps (1933–2005) was one of the premier curators of 20th-century art. Co-founder of Los Angeles’s Ferus Gallery and director of the Pasadena Museum of Art, he was responsible for the first retrospectives of Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell, and Marcel Duchamp. A key advocate of American Pop art, his 1962 survey “New Painting of Common Objects” was the first of its kind. After directing the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, he went on to build the Menil Collection museum in Houston and became its founding director in 1987.

Jessica Hundley is an author, filmmaker and journalist. She has written for the likes of Vogue, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times, and has authored books on artists including Dennis Hopper, David Lynch, and Gram Parsons. Hundley often explores the counterculture in her work, with a focus on metaphysics, psychedelia, and magic.

The editor and author

Born in Abadan, Iran, to Armenian parents, Tony Shafrazi was educated in England from age 13, graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1967. Moving to New York in 1969, he exhibited as a conceptual artist throughout Europe and New York. From 1974 to 1978, he advised and helped build an outstanding collection for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran. In 1979, he opened his New York gallery, introducing groundbreaking American artists of the 1980s including Haring, Basquiat, Scharf, Brown, and Baechler, while exhibiting masters of the ’60s: Warhol, Ruscha, and Hopper. From 1990, he exhibited the work of Brian Clarke, Patrick Demarchelier, Robert Williams, Michael Ray Charles, and David LaChapelle. Since 1997 he has represented the Estate of Francis Bacon, and continues to mount museum-quality exhibitions, most recently the critically acclaimed “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?”

This exciting collection of four hundred vintage prints from the 1960s — taken by Dennis Hopper and recently rediscovered — brilliantly documents the social, political, and creative highlights from a tumultuous era.

Lying hidden away in Dennis Hopper’s home until their discovery months after the artist’s death in 2010, this collection of spectacular photographs, exhibited only once in 1969–70 at the Fort Worth Art Center Museum, is a testament to Hopper’s prolific and enormous talent behind the camera. These photographs are spontaneous, intimate, poetic, observant, and decidedly political. While some are portraits of figures within Hopper’s circle of actor, artist, musician, and poet friends — including Jane Fonda, Paul Newman, and Robert Rauschenberg — they also include images from his extensive travels in Los Angeles, New York, London, Mexico, and Peru.

Hopper’s abiding support of the Civil Rights movement and social justice is evident in his shots from the march on Selma and Harlem street scenes. In images of beauty and stillness he transfers Abstract Expressionism into the artistic language of photography.

Throughout this stunning volume Hopper’s sensitive, keenly observant eye shines through, making it clear that he was a deeply committed chronicler of the events that were unfolding around him.

During the 1960s, Dennis Hopper carried a camera everywhere - on film sets and locations, at parties, in diners, bars and galleries, driving on freeways and walking on political marches. He photographed movie idols, pop stars, writers, artists, girlfriends, and complete strangers. Along the way he captured some of the most intriguing moments of his generation with a keen and intuitive eye. A reluctant icon at the epicenter of that decade’s cultural upheaval, Hopper documented the likes of Tina Turner in the studio, Andy Warhol at his first West Coast show, Paul Newman on set, and Martin Luther King during the Civil Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

In many ways, this work is photography as film, a poignant narrative expressed through a series of stark images - early shots of Tijuana bullfights, LA happenings and urban street scenes show an experimental freedom that would translate into the vivid cinematic imagery of Easy Rider and beyond.

From a selection of photographs compiled by Hopper and gallerist Tony Shafrazi - more than a third of them previously unpublished - this extensive volume distills the essence of Hopper's brilliantly prodigious photographic career. Also included are introductory essays by Tony Shafrazi and legendary West Coast art pioneer Walter Hopps, and an extensive biography by journalist Jessica Hundley. With excerpts from Victor Bockris's interviews of Hopper's famous subjects, friends, and family, this volume is an unprecedented exploration of the life and mind of one of America’s most fascinating personalities.

About the photographer:

Dennis Hopper (b. Dodge City, KS, 1936) is an acclaimed artist, actor, screenwriter, and director who first impressed audiences with his performances in Rebel Without A Cause (1955) and Giant (1956). He changed the face of American cinema with Easy Rider (1969), which he co-wrote, directed, and starred in. Hopper went on to act in hundreds of memorable films and television shows, including Apocalypse Now (1979), Blue Velvet (1986), Hoosiers (1986), True Romance (1993), Basquiat (1997), Elegy (2008), and the TV series Crash (2008). Hopper began painting as a child and started taking photos in 1961, after his then wife Brooke Hayward gave him a 35mm Nikon camera for his birthday. His paintings and photography have been exhibited all over the world, including the recent retrospective, "Dennis Hopper and the New Hollywood" in Paris. He works and lives in Venice, CA, with wife Victoria Duffy and his three children, Marin, Ruthanna and Henry.