The aftermath of Hopper's first film as director saw the global superstar and auteur on a self-exiled binge in Taos, New Mexico. Wrangling footage of his second, The Last Movie, into something approaching coherence while remaining true to shifting principles of incoherence proved predictably tough going - not least for anyone expected to sit through the result. Hopper's banishment was by then complete, but it was not unprecedented. After repeated run-ins with director Henry Hathaway on the set of From Hell to Texas he was effectively blackballed by Hollywood at the tender age of twenty-one.
He went to New York, where he studied with Lee Strasberg and fell in love - with modern art and [his first wife] Brooke [Hayward], James Dean had urged him to start taking photographs when they were filming Rebel Without a Cause in 1955 but Hopper did not get a serious camera a birthday present from Brooke until 1961. Back in LA the couple discovered a simmering art scene that was about to come to the boil. Hopper was in its midst as collector (he bought one of the first Warhol soup-can paintings), participant, friend and witness.
He was shy he said later, and liked the way the camera gave him something to fiddle with. As in a low-budget indie production, the nascent scene had a cast of dozens, some natives of this coastal paradise (like his lifelong friend, curator and impresario Walter Hopps), others, like Hopper himself (Kansas) and Ed Ruscha (born in Nebraska, raised in Oklahoma) from the Midwest. In opposition to the psychological depths plumbed by Abstract Expressionism (Hopper's first painterly passion in New York), LA art relished and reflected the mass visual culture of southern California. 'Pop' may have been a conceptual import, but its raw materials could be locally sourced. The streets were full of stuff that would end up in the paintings (and the photographs): cars, gas stations, billboards for the movie stars whom Hopper counted among his friends. They brought a glamour to the art which, in turn, celebrated the profundity of the superficial. The marriage of showbiz and art has been enduring, as a merger, it has proved stunningly lucrative.
- Geoff Dyer, See / Saw: Looking at Photographs, Edinburgh, 2021, p.80-81.
See also:Photography: Joel Meyerowitz: the heart of the photographic moment, 9 July 2024
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