A year before 1967’s famed Summer of Love, American photographer William Gedney(1932-1989) set out for San Francisco on a Guggenheim Fellowship to record what he described as “aspects of our culture which I believe significant and which I hope will become, in time, part of the visual record of American history.”
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Filled with optimism and hope, Gedney arrived in San Francisco ready to embed himself amid a new generation of youth coming of age that rejected the strictures of the status quo in the pursuit of happiness. He gravitated towards a group of hippies living at “The Pad,” a communal house in Haight Asbury, just a few blocks from the home of the seminal counterculture rock band Grateful Dead.
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Between October 1966 and January 1967, Gedney made 2,100 photographs across 62 rolls of 35 mm film, chronicling the everyday lives of a group of lovers and friends as the beatnik era gave way to the hippie scene. In these images there is nothing of the Pollyanna spirit to come, no “love will save the world” ethos brimming amid the youth, but rather a forlorn, more disaffected truth.
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