Hundreds of photos taken by American actor Dennis Hopper in the 1960s and found by chance after his death, went on display for the first time at a Berlin museum.

The exhibition, Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album, opened at the Martin Gropius Bau. The collection is made up of some 440 black and white photos bearing testament to six years in the life of the actor, who died in 2010.

“In his last will, my father asked for the compound of houses where he lived to be sold,” his eldest daughter Marin Hopper said at the opening of the exhibition, which runs until December 17.

“We put all his belongings in a storage. It’s only a year later when we sorted everything out that we found the boxes with all the pictures,” she added.

Fellow actors such as Paul Newman and John Wayne, a then-unknown Andy Warhol, painters Roy Lichtenstein and David Hockney, as well as singers such as Tina and Ike Turner, feature in the photos.

A number of them also attest to Hopper’s interest in politics, immortalising a civil rights march in Alabama attended by Martin Luther King and the Sunset Strip curfew riots in Hollywood in 1966.

Other photos reflect his passion for Mexico, but mostly the collection, which was previously shown in Texas and California in 1970 and 1971 by the actor himself, depicts everyday people he came across – hippies, bikers and the homeless.

“It’s like a walk through all his points of focus and interest,” his daughter said.

Shortly before Hopper’s home was destroyed in a mass fire in Bel Air in 1961, his future first wife Brooke Hayward had given him a camera which he kept around his neck day and night for six years, she said in the catalogue accompanying the display.

But in 1967, he suddenly stopped taking photos when he began writing the movie Easy Rider, whose success shot him to the realms of international stardom, curator Petra Giloy-Hirtz said.

“In the end, cinema remained his favourite art,” she added.