Nikon has announced its sponsorship of a photography exhibition titled, Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album. Hosted at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the exhibition will present more than 400 original photographs taken between 1961 and 1967 by Dennis Hopper, the American actor, film director, and artist. The photographs were personally selected and edited by Hopper for his first major exhibition at the Fort Worth Art Center in Texas in 1970, and the vintage prints were only re-discovered after his death in 2010. Jeremy Gilbert, Group Marketing Manager at Nikon UK, comments: “Hopper shot some fantastic images that reflected a personal perspective of an interesting period in history. Knowing that Hopper shot his work on a Nikon camera, with no formal training is truly inspirational and we look forward to celebrating his work with support of the exhibition this summer.” Te exhibition will run from Thursday 26 June – Sunday 19 October 2014.

Nikon Press Release

Nikon UK Sponsors Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album at the Royal Academy

London, UK, 20th June 2014 – Nikon UK is pleased to announce its sponsorship of a photography exhibition titled, Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album to be hosted at the Royal Academy of Arts in London this summer.

The exhibition will present more than four hundred original photographs taken between 1961 and 1967 by Dennis Hopper, the American actor, film director, and artist. The photographs were personally selected and edited by Hopper for his first major exhibition at the Fort Worth Art Center in Texas in 1970, and the vintage prints were only re-discovered after his death in 2010. This will be the first time that this body of work will be seen in the UK. 

Although not formally trained as an artist, Dennis Hopper created paintings and assemblages throughout his career and during the 1960s dedicated himself to taking photographs with a Nikon F camera given to him by his future wife Brooke Hayward.

Jeremy Gilbert, Group Marketing Manager at Nikon UK, comments: “Hopper shot some fantastic images that reflected a personal perspective of an interesting period in history. Knowing that Hopper shot his work on a Nikon camera, with no formal training is truly inspirational and we look forward to celebrating his work with support of the exhibition this summer.”

Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album presents both a personal visual diary and a document of America’s dynamic social and cultural life in the 1960s. The photographs move between humour and pathos, the playful and the intimate, the glamorous and the everyday. They are considered spontaneous, poetic, as well as political and sharply observant. Whether Dennis Hopper was in Los Angeles, New York, London, Mexico or Peru, he was interested in a vast range of themes and subjects. The influential American curator Walter Hopps described his photographs as “small movies, still photographs made on the sets and locations of imagined films in progress.”

According to Hopper, his interest in photography began in the late 1950s under the encouragement of James Dean, whom he had worked with on the set of Rebel without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956). After living in New York from c. 1957-1961, Hopper returned to Los Angeles where he found himself blacklisted in Hollywood and photography became Hopper’s main creative outlet. For the next six years he worked obsessively, taking an estimated 18,000 photographs.

Hopper took iconic portraits of Paul Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Jane Fonda and many other actors, artists, poets and musicians of his day. He photographed his family and friends and captured countercultural movements that ranged from Free Speech to Hells Angels and Hippie gatherings, taking in figures from the Beat and Peace movements such as Michael McLure and Timothy Leary. These often playful photographs were counterbalanced by images of tense and volatile events, such as the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery at the height of the African-American Civil Rights Movement, where he accompanied Martin Luther King. About his photographs, Hopper said “I wanted to document something. I wanted to leave something that I thought would be a record of it, whether it was Martin Luther King, the hippies, or whether it was the artist.”

Dates and Opening Hours

Open to public: Thursday 26 June – Sunday 19 October 2014

                                                10am – 6pm daily (last admission 5.30 pm)

                                                Fridays until 10 pm (last admission 9.30 pm)

For more information about the Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album exhibition please visit http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/22

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