Dennis Hopper: In Dreams: Scenes from the Archive

Unpublished Dennis Hopper: new light on the 1960s and the actor's unique transit through American history

Dennis Hopper: In Dreams connects Dennis Hopper’s roles as an actor, husband, father and photographer. Editor and designer Michael Schmelling has selected more than 100 photographs from Hopper’s archive (most of them unpublished) for this intimate book, and together they reveal the restless energy and curiosity of Hopper’s eye, as well as his unique place in the culture of 1960s America. An essayistic photobook, In Dreams mostly eschews Hopper’s iconic stand-alone images and instead looks to distill his archive into a connected set of photographs that offer new impressions and stories.

Referencing Roy Orbison’s song by the same name, famously featured in Blue Velvet, In Dreams includes appearances by famous faces such as John Wayne, Peter Fonda and Wallace Berman, which are intimately intertwined with Hopper’s peripatetic life and his daily use of the camera. Hopper was very much an insider—at ease with the celebrities and artists of his day—but this new engagement with his archive shows that, like many photographers, Hopper was also in some ways an outsider, an observer.

Filmmaker, actor and artist Dennis Hopper (1936–2010) first appeared on television in 1954 and spent the next five decades both in front of and behind the camera. As a photographer, his output was particularly concentrated in the 1960s; the Nikon camera his wife Brooke Hayward gifted him hung so prominently around his neck that friends jokingly called him “the tourist.”