Everyday life on the Haight: previously unseen portraits from the
hippie epicenter by the acclaimed documentarian
Elaine Mayes (born 1936) was a young photographer living in San
Francisco's lively Haight-Ashbury District during the 1960s. She had
photographed the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and, later that year,
during the waning days of the Summer of Love, embarked on a set of
portraits of youth culture in her neighborhood. By that time, the hippie
movement had turned from euphoria to harder drugs, and the Haight had
become less of a blissed-out haven for young people seeking a better way
of life than a halfway house for runaway teens.
Realizing the gravity of the cultural moment, Mayes shifted from the
photojournalistic approach she had applied to musicians and
concert-goers in Monterey to making formal portraits of people she met
on the street. Choosing casual, familiar settings such as stoops,
doorways, parks and interiors, Mayes instructed her subjects to look
into her square-format camera, to concentrate and be still: she made her
exposures as they exhaled. Mayes' familiarity with her subjects helped
her to evade mediatized stereotypes of hippies, presenting instead an
understated and unsentimental group portrait of the individual inventors
of a fleeting cultural moment.
Elaine Mayes: The Haight-Ashbury Portraits 1967-1968 is the first
monograph on one of the decade's most important bodies of work,
presenting more than 40 images from Mayes' series. An essay by art
historian Kevin Moore elaborates an important chapter in the history of
West Coast photography.
