Actor, painter, photographer, director, and
all-around Renaissance Man, Dennis Hopper
The sheer heft of Dennis Hopper's latest photography book,
Photographs, 1961-1967
, makes this 530-page volume worth the $700 price tag (now marked down to $465.11). I got it in the mail from amazon.com, and ensconced in a sturdy blue-linen box, it's bigger than a Guttenberg Bible.
As well it should be, given its over-the-top subject. With essays by Jessica Hundley, the late Walter Hopps and Hopper's gallerist Tony Shafrazi, a portrait of Hopper the crazed genius comes through. Hopps's introduction, The Taos Incident, sets the stage for the kaleidoscopic imagery that follows, with his account of a visit to Hopper's New Mexican abode sometime during the 1970s. During that trip, the purpose of which was to retrieve contact sheets and negatives for an upcoming retrospective, Hopps arrived in the midst of one of Dennis's manic episodes, riddling the walls of his own living room with a submachine gun.
Photographer and painter Ed Ruscha, 1964
This is no "vanity" project by an otherwise marginally-talented celebrity. Hopper was trained as an Abstract-Expressionist painter by no less than
Thomas Hart Benton
. Hopper applied his aesthetic training and instincts to photography when he was given a camera by friend and acting mentor James Dean during the filming of George Steven's 1956 epic,
Giant
.
Hopper went crazy with the Nikon, and went through hundreds of rolls of
Kodak Tri-X
, particularly during the 1960s, when he was more-or-less exiled from Hollywood because of his bad boy reputation. Many of the photographs printed herein are candids, as well as surrealistically-composed shots of showbiz friends and colleagues, such as
Tina and Ike Turner
,
John Wayne
, Peter and Jane Fonda, and denizens of the L.A. art scene like Shafrazi,
Ed Ruscha
and
Andy Warhol
. But what really makes his style gel are his gritty and straightforward black-and-white documentary shots of urban Los Angeles.
New York City, c. 1963
Hopper's exacting eye takes us on excursions across the United States, and especially to south of the border, into Tijuana. His Mexican photographs are his quietest, and most poignant. Hopper's images of rural and railroad scenes in the Mexican state of Durango alone make for a remarkable monograph of photography that transcends its travel and tourist origins.
Robert Fraser, Tijuana, 1965
If your coffee table is sturdy enough to accommodate this giant tome, I recommend gracing it with the most crucial period of this larger-than-life icon of the 1960s
avant-garde art scene. Dennis Hopper's work is both entertaining and enduring, and belongs on the same book shelves with such kindred spirits as Garry Winogrand,
Louis Faurer
,
Weegee
,
Diane Arbus
, and
Robert Frank
.
Painter James Rosenquist, 1964
Visit Taschen's
website to view a PDF of this fascinating book.
was, by the time of his death, a largely forgotten figure in the photographic world. Along with Baltimorean A. Aubrey Bodine
, Mortensen was the last great exponent of Pictorialism: A painterly school of photography that was supplanted in the late 1920s and early 1930s by the purism of such masters as Edward Weston
and Ansel Adams
.
, Goya
, Poe
, and Morticia Addams, but never came across as hodge-podge. In the early 1930s, his Los Angeles studio boasted such luminaries as Marlene Dietrich and Fay Wray, but it was Mortensen's grotesqueries and lurid pin-ups for which he would later be remembered.
-- the former Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications. 
(1936-2010). His fame peaked in the late 1960s to early 1970s, as a photographer of the music scene whose portraits of such rock legends as Jimmy Page and the Beatles were as iconic as photographs of Annie Leibowitz
or Linda McCartney
.
(the last generation of the famous Nikon F/FM series professional manual camera bodies), which was loaded with Kodak Tri-X
from my pocket and snapped this picture up.
said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Which means, don't let a great photo opportunity pass you by just because you're a retrograde purist (such as I) standing on ceremony.
architecture. Originally built as a gasoline station, this elegant building now serves as a beer and cold beverage store. I did not purchase anything upon this particular visit, but on prior and subsequent visits (especially in summer), I would pop in for an ice-cold Coronita. In the blistering August heat, it tasted like a magic elixir, and restored lost energy from a long day of shooting.
in those days), my negatives went into storage. During this period, a flood filled the basement they were housed in, the water mixing with chemical fertilizer that was also stored on the cellar floor. When I attempted to rescue my negatives years later, seventy-five percent of them were totally corroded by the Scott’s Turf Builder primeval soup.