Royal College of Art (RCA) held an exhibition of photgraphs by Dennis Hopper, ´The Lost Album'.
With a ticket price of UKL 10,- it did not come cheap.
Stewards told me not to take photographs, which annoyed me: they make money by photographers but won't allow souvenir pictures to be spread, sharing my enthusiasm for photography and this exhib in particular.
Typically an old and tedious institute, this RCA.
Doubt whether they will see me again here, not with an alternative such as The Photographers' Gallery available.
Dennis Hopper had a great enthusiasm for photography, but this lasted only a few years, during the 1960s.
This exhibition showed him growing taking portraits, around film locations and at the end experimenting
with abstracts. We also see civil rights protests and tripping hippies;
there are billboards, highways,
gas stations and preachers. He simply photographed whatever intrigued him.
At filmsets he was referred to as 'the Tourist', seeing him always with his camera. This changed when
he directed Easy Rider, becoming more involved in directing; he never took up a camera again.
It was quite entertaining, but I refused to give the RCA the satisfaction of buying 'The Lost Album'.
Photos © Ruud Leeuw
