Why the pictures matter
Most people’s mental picture of the Summer of Love is a set of photographs: a barefoot girl with flowers in her hair, a crowd on Haight Street, a musician on a porch, a painted bus. These images were taken by a relatively small number of working photographers, published in magazines and books, and repeated for decades, until they came to stand in for the event. Understanding who took them, for whom and what they left out is one of the most useful ways of reading the period.
The photographers
Several photographers are closely associated with the San Francisco scene, and the following are examples rather than a complete list.
Gene Anthony photographed the Haight and the rock bands in 1966 and 1967, and he later published a book of his work, The Summer of Love: Haight-Ashbury at Its Highest, in 1980. He knew many of the musicians and shop owners personally, which gave his pictures an informal, close-up quality.
Bob Campbell is another photographer whose Haight-Ashbury pictures from the period are cited in accounts of the scene, adding to the record of the street’s daily life.
Jim Marshall was best known for his portraits of musicians, including the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin, and for his work at the Monterey International Pop Festival. Baron Wolman became the first chief photographer for Rolling Stone magazine, which was launched in November 1967 and brought a new standard of rock photography to the music press.
The choice of subjects reflects personal access, not any attempt at a full record. Photographers followed the people they knew, the bands and the most photogenic scenes, and they were less likely to photograph the sick, the hungry or the exhausted.
Magazine photo essays
Photographs reached the wider public through the newspapers and magazines that were also shaping the story. The picture magazines of the day and the weekly news magazines published long features on the hippies during the summer, and the visual style of those spreads set a template. They favoured young people in colourful clothes, musical instruments, signs and slogans, and street scenes that could be understood at a glance. Mass media coverage depended on pictures that were simple, bright and quickly read.
Underground papers like the Oracle used photography differently, often combining pictures with psychedelic colour printing and hand-drawn lettering. These pages were part of the same visual world as the dance posters, and some of the best-known psychedelic rock posters were produced by artists who worked in that style. The local publications show how participants chose to present themselves, which is not the same as the way outsiders saw them.
Images that shaped memory
A few image types recur in later books and documentaries:
- Young women with flowers or face paint, often photographed outdoors in Golden Gate Park.
- Crowds on Haight Street, sometimes seen from a raised angle.
- Musicians on rooftops, porches or stages.
- Children in hippie settings, used to suggest an alternative family life.
- Protest and ceremony scenes, such as the Death of Hippie procession.
Each of these represents something real, but the frequency with which they are reproduced can create an impression of uniformity. Photographs of grim conditions, arrests or hospital queues are far less often reprinted, though they existed in newspapers and in the archives of agencies and clinics.
Guidance for writers describing photographs
Writers who use 1967 images, or describe scenes from them, should be careful. Several habits keep an account honest:
- Describe what is visible. Say what is in the frame (clothing, setting, number of people) before offering any interpretation.
- Do not invent names or captions. If the photographer or subject is unknown, say so. Do not give a person a name, a quote or a backstory that the source does not supply.
- Check the date and place. Many pictures labelled “Summer of Love” were taken in other months, other years or other cities. If the date is uncertain, write “undated” or “taken around 1967”.
- Credit the photographer where known, and avoid implying that one picture represents the whole summer.
- Treat recollections as claims. A person’s later explanation of a picture is useful evidence, but memory is imperfect.
- Avoid inventing mood. Do not assume that everyone in a crowd felt joy or peace because the picture looks happy.
These practices matter most when the picture is the only source for a scene, which is often the case with crowd photographs.
Reading the evidence
Treat a photograph as a record of a moment chosen by someone for a reason. It can confirm that a thing happened and show how it looked, but it cannot show what came before or after it. Pictures of the Haight are most valuable when read alongside written accounts, official records and the recollections of people who were there, and when used with attention to what the photographer may have missed.