Dennis Hopper's photographic legacy - Telegraph Two months after his death in May 2010, Dennis Hopper had his first retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles. It was a momentous event. Previously, his photographs had been shown in Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, St Petersburg, Prague, Tokyo and Kyoto, in Fort Worth, Denver and even Wichita. But in the city where he forged his careers as actor and artist, where he was as much a fixture on the art scene as Ed Ruscha and David Hockney, and where he lived until he died of prostate cancer - nothing. Born Dennis Lee Hopper to a wheat-farming family in Kansas, 1936, he moved to California with his parents in the early Fifties. The same year he was signed to Warner Brothers, aged 18, he was introduced to Abstract Expressionism by the fellow actor and collector Vincent Price. He co-starred with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956), but a quarrel with director Henry Hathaway on the set of From Hell to Texas (1958) left him out in the cold. It was during this hiatus from Hollywood that he took up photography. Between 1961, when his first wife Brooke Hayward bought him a Nikon, and the moment he began writing the script for Easy Rider, Hopper photographed ceaselessly. This charged decade, with its cultural upheaval and social shifts, was a gift to any photographer. "I wanted to leave something that I thought would be a record of it," Hopper said. "He was talented, self-confident, radical," says Giloy-Hirtz, "the definitive Hollywood rebel. There was no normalcy, no boredom, no taboos. His unique position and circle of friends gave him carte blanche to document artists, musicians, poets and actors as well as the Hell's Angels and hippies that were so much a part of the scene. "Dennis was a fixture," said the artist Ed Ruscha. He was just always around, always taking pictures and making things. "He was in the middle of everything, and there was a lot of drugs, parties," said Giloy-Hirtz. "You think "Wow, high life," but the photographs really give off a loneliness." In an interview in 2007, Hopper himself said: "The necessity to make these photos came from a real place - a place of desperation and solitude - with the hope that someday these objects would be seen, filling the void I was feeling." "The thing I appreciated was he was so kind of restless," said Ruscha. And then you say, God, he's had more than one life. I mean, here he checks in with all these great performances in movies, but he always comes back to art. 'Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album' is at the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, until December 17. The book (Prestel, £35) is available to pre-order for £31.50 plus £1.35 p&p.