Across the Great Divide
A Photo Chronicle of the Counterculture
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
In 1969 Roberta Price received a grant and traveled west to explore and photograph the communes that had begun to spring up in New Mexico and Colorado. Over the next eight years she took more than 3,000 photos of commune life, and now she has selected 121 images for publication in a visual memoir that reflects on her experiences and invites us to contemplate the rural counterculture of her youth.
Unlike most photographers of the back to the land movement, Price "went native," joining a Colorado community and living there for seven years. Her photo documentation of her years at Libre provides a unique view of commune life through the eyes of a participant. We see residents building homes, raising families, and celebrating community.
Price's photographs of Drop City, New Buffalo, Reality Construction Company, Libre, the Red Rockers, and other southwestern communes capture long-haired men, women in self-made peasant attire, psychedelic art, sheaves of marijuana, cast-iron stoves, and preindustrial agricultural practices—visual evidence of the great divide that separated Price, her friends, and associates from the families and neighbors among whom they had grown up. The photos also reveal the presence of record players, amplifiers, and electric guitars, along with a staggering array of architectural and interior design, and visits by such iconoclasts as Ken Kesey, Peter Orlovsky, and Allen Ginsberg. The most famous cliché about the era is that if you can remember it, you weren’t there. Price was there with her camera, and her images help us see it more clearly now.
Gold Medal Winner for Photography, ForeWord Reviews 2010 Book of the Year Awards
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With these 121 photographs, Price (Huerfano) offers a guided tour of the communities and communes places like the Red Rockers, Drop City, Reality Construction Company that sprang up in New Mexico and Colorado in the late 1960s and early '70s. Price's understated, almost journalistic foray is lit by warmth, humor, and the abundant tenderness of her subjects; the photographs function as part family album (Price herself called a commune her home for seven years), part countercultural slide show, part lesson in American history. The photos in both color and black and white depict commune life: colorfully painted buses, naked babies, long-haired men, bearded musicians, countercultural icons passing through, vegetable gardens, all set against the dramatic southwestern horizon. If at first glimpse, these images appear as familiar images of hippie culture, a closer look reveals nuance and idiosyncrasy. Characters recur, a story begins to emerge, and the work unfurls into a profound exploration that touches on ethnography.
