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Dennis Hopper, actor, director, and artist, began making paintings and assemblages in the mid-1950s. In the early 1960's, Hopper was influenced by art world friends including California artists, Edward Kienholz, and Bruce Connor. It was at this time he began making photographs of likes of Timothy Leary, Martin Luther King, and Andy Warhol. "Hopper's photographs from the 1960's so often convey a 'right in the middle' point of view, close up to their subjects, obliquely angled, zooming in not on a 'subject' but on a series of moments. Some of these moments are posed, even staged, others are fleeting and candid; some of these images are of people, others are of places, still others of situations and events, and still others of pure images formed in quotidian reality and framed by the camera eye into abstraction and/or the ground-zero semiotic encouraged, even dictated, by the Pop sensibility. Many of Hopper's photographs have a 'painterliness' to them that bespeaks his roots in Abstract Expressionism. (Peter Frank, "Dennis Hopper, A System of Moments," MAK Museum Catalogue, Vienna, Austria, 2001)
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