Fractured Girl
Dennis Hopper was best known as an actor but he was also a prolific and influential sculptor, painter, and photographer. He took up photography as a hobby in the 1960s and eventually became so acclaimed that he was even profiled in an issue of Better Home and Gardens Magazine as a “photographer to watch” for in the future. Hopper was also an important art collector.
Below are some of my favorite Hopper photographs:
Double Standard
Andy Wahol
Bruce Conner (in tub), Toni Basil, Teri Garr, and Ann Marshall
Donald Factor
Larry Bell
Paul Newman
Tuesday Weld
Biker Couple
After the Fall
Through the Shattered Lens 
Wow what a talent. I had seen a couple of his photographs before, but I wasn’t impressed. Now I am. These are fab, superb pics. My Blue Velvet Man could do it all.
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Never knew he was also an accomplished photographer. I now wonder if he was playing a photojournalist in Apocalypse Now or just being himself.
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From everything I’ve read, I think Dennis Hopper was pretty much playing himself in Apocalypse Now.
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Well, the character was left nameless, and I wouldn’t have put it past Dennis Hopper to go chasing after a person like Col. Walter Kurtz in the depths of the Cambodian jungle.
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I’ve also read that the photojournalist character in Apocalypse Now was based on Errol Flynn’s son, Sean. Sean Flynn, after starring in a few minor films, became a photojournalist and disappeared in Cambodia during the Viet Nam War.
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I had the immense privilege–and I use the word “privilege” with the utmost meaning–to witness an exhibition of Dennis Hopper’s artwork and photography at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, not long before Mr Hopper’s passing.
I recognise a number of the images from the ones pictured above, especially “Biker Couple”. I really loved this one image of Jane Fonda reclining in a chair, and then there was a picture of Ronnie Spector, and if you look in the background…wow, these are really great photographs. The exhibition even had work from those who were close to Dennis, such as Dean Stockwell (yes, Mr Stockwell is quite handy with paints and canvas).
A lot of audiovisual features were presented at the display, including several outtakes from films featuring Dennis, TV commercials and the entire short length film that he directed in 2000, entitled “Homeless”. There was also the footage from 1983 of Dennis blowing himself up!
Several months before all that, I had a ticket to a Q&A with Mr Hopper, but alas the ailing filmmaker/actor/photographer/do-it-all was not well enough to travel to Australia.
It was three years ago that I saw “Palermo Shooting” at the Festival of German Films. Directed by Wim Wenders, the film sees Dennis Hopper playing Death Itself, and even though much of the film could have used some tightening, Mr Hopper’s monologue right near the end of the movie, a soliloquy about the illusory nature of photography and the reality of death, is one of the best speeches I’ve heard in a film (to elaborate, rock musician Camino plays a photographer; Dennis appears at several different points of the film, attempting to take the photographer’s life, but is foiled repeatedly in his efforts to do so). The speech sounds like something that Dennis would have written himself. Looking back, it’s all rather poignant, considering it was one of the last times that Dennis would appear on camera for a movie. I recommend the movie for Dennis alone.
Remember that apart from playing the shutterbug in “Apocalypse Now”, he was also art dealer Tom Ripley in “The American Friend” (1977, directed by Wim Wenders), a film that I was most fortunate to see recently in 35mm, also at the ACMI. And of course, he is brilliantly terrifying (and occasionally downright hilarious) as Frank Booth in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet”. Even though much of the film is rather chilling, The “Beer at Ben’s” scene always makes me laugh.
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