He is best remembered as the ultimate hell-raising actor – a hard-living wild man who specialised in movie characters who were generally unstable, if not deranged. But for much of the 1960s Dennis Hopper was pursuing an alternative career as a professional photographer.

This other side of Hopper will be revealed at the Royal Academy of Arts on Thursday, when more than 400 of the actor's favourite photographs will go on show.

"He is actually a really great photographer and he wanted to be remembered as a photographer," Hopper's daughter Marin said on Tuesday. "He wanted to be collected seriously and he wanted to be in museum shows."

The photographs in the show, called The Lost Album, were taken between 1961-67, when Hopper was effectively blacklisted by Hollywood. They were exhibited in 1970, at the Fort Worth Art Center in Texas, before being boxed up by Hopper and more or less forgotten.

Marin Hopper, who discovered the boxes after her father's death in 2010, knew about the 1970 show but had no idea he had kept all the photographs. "It was extraordinary," she said. "I was surprised he kept them at home because he had art storage and also that he never really mentioned it to anyone."

Hopper took around 18,000 pictures with his Nikon F; the ones in the show are both a personal visual diary and a document of the wild and freewheeling cultural life of 1960s America.

Marin said when she first went through them they seemed like movie storyboards. "If you look at them from beginning to end, you feel like you've travelled in a time capsule of America."

The show is being staged in the RA's Burlington Gardens galleries, which used to house the Museum of Mankind and which will be redeveloped next year.

There are photographs of the many visual artists Hopper knew and was friends with – including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenburg, Jasper Johns, Marcel Duchamp and David Hockney – as well as portraits of fellow actors, such as a smouldering Paul Newman and a delighted and newly-wed Jane Fonda.

There is a fair amount of fun and larking around in many of the photographs – and plenty of Hells Angels and hippie girls dancing. These are counterbalanced by more tense pictures Hopper took in 1965, when he tracked Martin Luther King's Selma to Montgomery march.

The show's curator, Petra Giloy-Hirtz, said she thought the show would change perceptions of Hopper. "He is not only a great actor and writer and director, he is a wonderful photographer and a very serious and dedicated one," she said.

"When you walk around, the sixties really flash before your eyes … This show is about one of the most vivid and inspiring epochs in our past history. The world was on fire, an expression Hopper uses, with art, with music and with love."

As well as the photographs, visitors will hear strains of the The Band's 1968 hit The Weight echoing around the galleries and see a short extract from Easy Rider, Hopper's groundbreaking 1967 film.

• Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album is at the RA, from 26 June to 19 October