Haight-Ashbury, 1967

I went back to LA after the Peace March, but the die was cast. I had spent a couple of days wandering around Haight-Ashbury while there and was totally taken with what was going on. People were having a ball! There was a fun-filled spontaneity to EVERYTHING! To someone who had grown up in an atmosphere of death and dying (my mother had died from  MS when I was 11), of McCarthyism and the Cold War, and then had spent four years in  college studying science and history while reading the  Existential nightmares of Khafka  and Sartre, the idea of chucking it all and having FUN was very appealing. Thus, I went back to LA, finished up whatever job I was doing at the time, and prepared to go to San Francisco and try my hand at the SUMMER OF LOVE!

Initially Golden Gate Park was the center of everything. There was this place called Hippie Hill and everyday musicians would congregate there and play for hours while scores of daily-arriving hippies laid out on its grassy slopes, smoking joints and thinking about what to do next.

I called her Miss Sunshine and in many ways this picture sums up what much of the summer was like: Hippie Chicks, music, stoned freaks, and people just digging the moment.

This picture also shows a stereotypical view of what went on everyday. It was a summer of LSD-induced trances and people lost in their own inner realms in the midst of hundreds of others who could only stand and watch--even while wishing they could be there too.

There were dozens of impromptu concerts that summer and this picture shows a typical crowd. As the summer progressed, the hair got longer and the clothes got wilder, but that didn't happen for awhile. At first we were just a bunch of straight people who weren't too sure what we were searching for, we just all knew that we WERE searching.

This multiple reflection picture made while looking through the side window of a concert sound truck captures my feeling of the kaleidoscopic reality that was Haight-Ashbury. Psychedelic Man!

The words at the top, the bright sun and dark shadow, and the Hippie girl striding along with her colorful shawl and straight hair certainly typify the feeling of Haight Street in the early summer. 

As the summer progressed, however, there was a decided change in the weather and by mid-July we were enveloped daily in chilly fogs as this study of two young women shows. They're still barefoot and mini-skirted while walking along looking like escapees from a scene on London's Carnaby Street, but the blush was off the rose. Languid sunshine-filled days in the park were a thing of the past. 

This is certainly a graphic example of what Haight-Ashbury looked like by late summer. People still kept coming, but now there was a look of apprehension in their faces. In a way it was sort of like what happened at Woodstock two years later which also started out as a giant lighthearted outdoor party until the rains came. Still, like Woodstock, we refused to be cowed by the sudden shift of reality. We all pulled together and made the most of what was still happening. The indoor concerts at the Fillmore and the Avalon and the Haight Theater became our places of refuge where we smoked our dope, dropped our acid and dreamed of wither we went from here.

Eventually summer ended. The party finally wound down and as fall approached, we got ready to go on with our lives. North of San Francisco, just beyond the Golden Gate Bridge was a place called Mount Tamalpais which gave one fantastic vistas of the surrounding area. Here we were, high above the fog-shrouded valleys below, staring out at the sublime view of a California sunset, the mighty Pacific Ocean covered by a fog bank as far as our eyes could see! The show was over, but its memories would see us through the thousand and one nights of the political nightmares which would soon follow. 

San Francisco Peace March, April 1967

The most contentious political issue to emerge in the 1960's was the question of the Vietnam War. Racial equality was an old story, but President Johnson's Civil Rights legislation had gone a long way toward establishing a framework for its eventual achievement, however there was no such solution for the War. Thus, by 1967 a growing vocal opposition to the War was sweeping the country. Meanwhile, in LA I was also hearing a lot of things about San Francisco, mostly about the Hippies and  Haight-Ashbury, so when I read there was going to be a large demonstration against the War in San Francisco, I decided it was time to go up and see what was going on. Therefore, in April I went to join the protest.

Allen Ginsberg, the  Beat Poet, had relocated to San Francisco and was a prominent figure both in the anti-war movement and also in the emerging New Age scene that was swirling around the LSD-inspired Hippie rock music /Eastern religion /Be-In movement.

The operative word in all of this was L-O-V-E!

The march itself was very impressive as it drew 100,000 people from the Bay Area and much of California to participate in what was a glorious, and peaceful protest of a war that ultimately would claim over 54,000 American lives, as well as countless Vietnamese deaths. In spite of the fact that we lost the war amidst dire threats that disastrous consequences would befall our nation and all of Southeast Asia, virtually nothing happened except that the country of Vietnam became united after decades of Colonial depredations by outside powers.

Noah Purifoy In His Studio

Besides seeing art, I started THINKING about it, too. This began initially with my going to see the Watts Towers--a kind of urban folk art built by an immigrant worker named Simon Rodia over a period of 32 years on the small wedge of land he owned in the midst of sprawling LA. This in turn led to my meeting a Black artist named Noah Purifoy and to our having a series of conversations which made a strong impact on me. Eventually all this thought crystallized around an article I read in U.S. Camera written by David Vestal and entitled Recipe for Seeing. It made a distinct impression on me--so much so that I dissected it line by line, then interpolated these nascent thoughts of mine into it in the appropriate places, calling the resulting treatise Photography ad infinitum. The principles embodied in this amalgamation of ideas ultimately served as the foundation for my career as an artist.

Photography ad Infinitum

Bob, do you remember the article in U.S. Camera, "Recipe For Seeing" by David Vestal? Well, I reread it several times after getting your letter, and suddenly realized I had completely missed its point. I now find that it has much to say about the line along which I have tentatively been traveling, and there are several key phrases I want to discuss.

The vital ingredients of your photography are the things you see that you care about. They are your own complex reactions to your own personal and private experiences. You can't share them with people except by giving expression to them. You know instinctively, if you permit yourself to know, what you need, who you are, and what you must do. Photograph things you have strong or clear feelings about. Mean what you say. Work for your own satisfaction, not to please others. Working to please yourself is neither capricious or anti-social, it is a practical approach based on working with what you can know. You can't know what others feel anymore than you can live their lives for them. When you photograph people who are showing emotion, the feeling you work from is still your own--triggered by association with what they seem to be going through. You could be quite mistaken about them, and still express your own feelings accurately through the way you see and show their expressions.

In doing something creative, something expressive, Bob, you must do it with your whole being. There can be no secrets, nothing held back. When you press the shutter release you must say, this is me, this is what I believe, or else the result is only a sham having no involvement with the subject. It will only be the result of certain mechanical actions. Possibly this sounds unimportant, but I don't believe it can be taken lightly.

It is better to act on casual impulses than to carry out planned projects for which you have carefully figured out everything according to what you think you should feel. The problem people get into when they begin to follow  a system or theory instead of their own eyes and sensitivity is that they prevent anything really good from happening to them unless it fits the doctrine of their choice. 

I would carry this further and add to system and theory, pattern of life. Being creative demands a love of life, an involvement with people, a continuous wonderment at the differences in the world, and also a mind receptive to all forms of expression by the people, races, and things of that world. Above all, this means banishing the fear of life and of living from your consciousness. As long as you are afraid of people, of new ideas, and of the effects they might have on you, you cannot truly be experiencing life to its fullest and thus are severely limiting your creative abilities. Life can be such a beautiful evolving kaleidoscope of colors, faces, patterns, sounds and scenes if only you will allow yourself to become enmeshed in it. Push out, permit yourself to expand, to experience to the fullest.

Judson Powell, an artist from Watts, probably said it best one night: You have to take the fear out of your life. Once you do that, you really begin to live. I  wish that I could say it more directly, but I cannot. This is not something you can express verbally, it is an experience itself.

If you analyze, you will see that pictures are not ends in themselves, but only means to ends. More important is what you start from, the thing the picture is about: an experience that is alive for you, so fine or so awful that you are moved to do something about it. Art does not come first with wise artists; life does. Art is a way of knowing life and of telling about it, passing it on. The manufacture of pictures, in itself, means nothing. Living needs no justification, no motivation, no explaining. There it is: living is everything for us. Photography at its best is one good way of knowing that you are alive and making the most of it.

This is the TRUTH, baby, as best as it can be written. I know one man here in LA who is a living example of this last paragraph--Noah Purifoy. Noah and I have spent hours talking, discussing two things mostly: living and being. We were brought together by his art, but we seldom ever discuss it. That is just a front. It pays his bills and it keeps a constant influx of people through his life from whom he draws inspiration and ideas and to whom he tries to dispense his own particular recipe for living. However, most people will never have the benefit of communicating with this man and thus they will never know why their lives are so empty and his so full.    (to be continued...)

Sculpture of the 60's

In Los Angeles I began to take a serious look at what was happening in art. In college my best friend Roger and I had gone to Washington, DC, to see the Mona Lisa which was touring America. I did not get much from my brief encounter with that masterpiece, but the tour through the National Gallery itself was an eye-opener. It was the first time I had beheld  great art and I was astounded, both at what I saw and at what I felt. In LA I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but the art there was different. It wasn't so much about Europe and all that Old Master stuff. It was more about surface and less about meaning--much like LA itself. These pictures are from a then current exhibit: Sculpture of the 60's. 

Life In LA

LA wasn't all freeways and billboards, however. There were also periods spent sampling city life. I found myself living on Alvarado Street just across the street from MacArthur Park, a sprawling urban park that was a welcome escape from the rigors of the freeway. Watching these older men playing chess was definitely a change of pace from charging along at highway speeds. I also went down to San Juan Capistrano where I observed two young boys who were enthralled not with swallows (who hadn't arrived yet), but with this white dove.

Got My Eye On You

I quickly settled into life in LA and life in LA revolved around its Freeways. I spent hours driving all over them because most of my jobs were Freeway oriented. Whether it was doing store inventories, setting up record display racks, selling photo coupons, you name it, they all entailed driving miles and miles on LA Freeways. This particular billboard caught my attention because it was very Pop and very LA. Girls in Los Angeles were a different breed from the demure women I had known in the South, and this oversized image on a billboard seemed to capture their Hollywood Spirit quite well.