Elaine Mayes 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 to 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 and 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 as radically utopian and casually tragic,
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 forty images from Mayes' extensive series. An
essay by art historian Kevin Moore elaborates an important chapter
in the history of West Coast photography during this critical
cultural and artistic period.
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