In the sixties Elaine Mayes is a young photographer, who grew up between Berkeley, Stanford and San Francisco, where she settled in a municipality of Haight-Ashbury, a neighborhood that has remained etched in our memory as the epicenter of summer of lovethe period between the spring and summer of 1967 when masses of young people from all over the United States gather to participate in a “spiritual awakening” led by the hippie counterculture and the protests against the Vietnam War, which began in 1955.
One of the key events of those months is the Monterey festival, from 16 to 18 June, followed by about 200 thousand people and in which artists such as Simon and Garfunkel, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, the Byrds, the Grateful Dead, the Who perform. and an almost unknown Jimi Hendrix who, at the end of the concert, sets his guitar on fire. Mayes stands under the stage, with a Hullabaloo magazine accreditation; compressed by the crowd, she has limited space to move, but in the difficulty she focuses on a close and central perspective that highlights the expressiveness of the musicians thanks to the lights and the smoke of the scene.
The hippie euphoria fades early in the fall, also due to drug abuse and the increase in crime. According to Mayes, the myth of the summer of love and Haight-Ashbury were created by newspapers, which, focusing on stereotypes, free love and LSD, failed to capture its true essence.
Drawing inspiration from the portraits of Diane Arbus, whom he meets on the street inviting her to his commune, Mayes wants to create his portrait of Haight-Ashbury. She puts aside the photojournalistic and dynamic approach she has worked with up to that point and chooses a formal style, with a Hasselblad and a tripod. The story develops on casual encounters with the inhabitants of the neighborhood who generally agree to be photographed, without too many frills: in front of the house, in a park, on a staircase.
The photographer recommends subjects to inspire deeply and then snap when they exhale, “that’s all I’ve done,” she recently recounted in an interview. In fact, all Mayes has done is to seek spontaneity and record moments of truth in the lives of unconventional teenagers, artists and families who have been subject to simplification and demonization.
In the introduction to the first publication of these photos, the book Haight-Ashbury portraits (Damiani), art historian Kevin Moore states that Mayes’ work is a clear monument to a fragile era and reminds us of the need for reckless optimism to always be in place.