Fotografía: Dennis Hopper: actor, director and – yes – brilliant photographer
Last week Jeffrey Deitch, the new director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (Moca) in Los Angeles, announced that his first exhibition, scheduled for July, will feature the paintings and photographs of Dennis Hopper. It will be curated by Hopper's close friend, the artist and film-maker Julian Schnabel.
Hopper, who will be 74 next month, is a semi-mythic figure both as an actor and director, but his art and photography are less well-known. In the blogosphere, the announcement raised questions about art-world nepotism, as well as the blurring of the boundaries between art and show business. "This is exactly the sort of PT Barnum extravaganza, dripping with cronyism, star-fucking and insider dealing, that Deitch's main detractors feared he would bring to Moca," wrote Steven Kaplan on post.thing.net. "It feels like an extension of the titillating, fame-obsessed, outre projects that often dominated his NY galleries … Schnabel has directed Hopper in his films. Hopper owns Schnabel paintings. They are 'dear friends'."
Kaplan acknowledges that Hopper's photographs are "noteworthy". In fact, they are more than that. For most of the 1960s, Hopper was a Hollywood outsider with a reputation as a troublemaker and a rebel. He had appeared in Rebel Without a Cause with his close friend James Dean in 1955, but had subsequently been consigned to one too many supporting roles. What he really wanted to do was direct films that flew in the face of Hollywood convention – something he achieved, to a degree, with 1969's Easy Rider, which ushered in a new era of vibrant independent film-making in America.
From 1961 to 1967, though, Hopper made photographs as if his life depended on it. In the vividly impressionistic introduction to Out of the Sixties – his first book of photographs, published in 1986 – Hopper wrote: "I never made a cent from these photos. They cost me money but kept me alive … They were the only creative outlet I had for these years until Easy Rider. I never carried a camera again."
The book is divided into thematic sections: Warhol and the Factory, 1964; Artists and Collectors; Hollywood; Music; Civil Rights March, Selma to Montgomery; Mexico, the Scene. It tells you where Hopper's head was at in the 1960s – which is to say, all over the place. In grainy black-and-white, using only natural light, he photographed Ruscha and Rauschenberg, John Wayne and Dean Martin, James Brown and the Byrds, Martin Luther King and Timothy Leary, Mexican graveyards and the Grateful Dead. The closest he came to documentary reportage are his images from the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. The rest, including his portraits, often look like ornate tableaux which constantly draw the eye from the subject to the backdrop and back again. He never cropped his photographs. Somehow they work; often brilliantly.
Here is Wayne and his sidekick Martin, two celluloid cowboys glimpsed through the tripod of a film camera, waiting for the "action" to begin. Here is Ike Turner, sharp as a switchblade, one hand resting on a piano, while beside him Tina Turner watches while scrubbing a shirt on a washboard. They seem to be backstage at a fairground or a circus. It is hard to know what exactly is going on in this photograph, but the tableau is overloaded with metaphors – about race, show business, roleplay and marriage.
Even in his photographs, then, Hopper deployed a film-maker's eye. "In a curious way, what seems special about Hopper's photographs now is that they seem to resemble shots from movies," wrote Walter Hopps, the iconoclastic American curator, in a short essay for Out of the Sixties. "Not so much frames from films, but still photographs made on the sets and locations of imagined films in progress … wonderful ones."
The shot I like best is an intimate one, part-portrait, part-social history. It is called simply Biker Couple in a Bar. Like many of Hopper's portraits, it has been taken up close, so the couple almost fill the frame. She is relaxed but glamorous, holding a cigarette in one hand and a glass of beer in the other, her heavily made-up eyes staring downwards as if lost in thought. He, too, is gazing off out of the frame as if daydreaming, his torso bare and tattooed, his quiff immaculately groomed, and possibly high-lighted. They look like bikers as a Hollywood film-maker might imagine them; but they are real, and so is the setting.
It is that hinterland between the real and the imagined, the everyday and the mythic, that Hopper's best images revisits again and again. One cannot help but wonder how his style would have developed if he had stayed with photography, even as, with hindsight, we can see that his feverish mind was less than suited to the patient capturing of stillness. For all that, though, his photographs do not depend on his name or his art-world contacts to be considered as contemporary art. They stand alone as testament to the maverick imagination of Hopper: actor, director and, fleetingly but brilliantly, photographer.
Now see this
Dorothy Bohm's evocative black-and-white street photography was exhibited at the ICA in 1969 alongside the work of Don McCullin and Tony Ray-Jones; but, until now, she had never had a major retrospective. This show spans six decades and also features Bohm's colour photography and a recreation of her studio. A chance to reappraise the work of an underrated pioneer of social observation.
The World Observer is at Manchester Art Gallery until 30 August 2010. Admission is free.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/apr/26/dennis-hopper-photograph-moca
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