Haight-Ashbury Portraits 1967-1968 by Elaine Mayes

MAYESELAINEPortraits1967–1968

ELAINE MAYES

Portraits 1967–1968

11 Linda, Straight Theater, 1968

Man with Nasturtiums, 1968

Sherry Johnson, 21, Wearing Tablecloth, Panhandle, Haight-Ashbury, August 22, 1968

The Man with Blowing Hair (Kenneth Williams), Haight Street, 1968

Cookie and Rich with Motorcycle, 1968

Woman in Checkered Suit, 1968

Bill Osborne, 24, Kenneth Williams, 22, Tabitha Carter, 1, and Jamie Carter, 21, Haight Street, August 30, 1968

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Haight-Ashbury Portraits 1967-1968 by Elaine Mayes

Published on Sep 13, 2022

Damiani

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. 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 utop

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