Had Hollywood not lured him away, Dennis Hopper could have made his name as a photographer

In an age when photographs have swollen out of all proportion to their significance, and are mounted on wall-sized light boxes the better to show off their high-resolution colour, it’s a relief to see an exhibition of small photographic prints in good old black and white. Dennis Hopper (1936–2010) is best known as an actor and hell-raiser, but he was also an artist who worked in various media. ‘I am an Abstract Expressionist and an Action Painter by nature,’ he insisted, but in the Sixties he took thousands of photographs, a group of 400 of which are now on display in the Academy’s Burlington Gardens galleries. Because they are relatively small, they are arranged in blocks on the walls of these spacious rooms. The viewer can look at them sequentially, or can move around more freely, jumping in and out of the river of images, sampling as you go. If Hopper had continued to take photographs, rather than giving up when he started to direct the film Easy Rider in 1967, he could easily have made a name as a photographer.