“Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album” opens in London at the Royal Academy of Arts today. The exhibition includes over 400 photographs taken between 1961 and 1967. The original photographs were selected by Hopper for his first photography exhibition in Fort Worth Art Center in Texas in 1970, the prints were rediscovered after his death four years ago. The American actor was encouraged to take up photography by James Dean when they worked together on the set of Rebel Without a Cause in 1955 and Giant in 1956. According to curator Petra Giloy-Hirtz, Hopper shot over 18,000 photographs in his lifetime, documenting the civil rights movement, hippie parties, fighting biker gangs, fellow actors, and friends such as Jane Fonda and Paul Newman, and artists including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and David Hockney. Hopper said “I wanted to document something. I wanted to leave something that I thought would be a record of it, whether it was Martin Luther King, the hippies or whether it was an artist.” Marin Hopper, his daughter, stressed that despite his fame and fortune garnered as an actor, he wanted to be remembered as a photographer. “I don’t know if people understand how important photography was to him,” she said. “When he died, he really wanted to be remembered as a photographer first and foremost. He told me near the end that he wanted to be taken seriously as a photographer and be in collections and museums.”