San Francisco Photography Adventures Part 3: Counterculture

This is the last post in my San Francisco adventures saga. Posts 1 and 2 are linked at the bottom.

San Francisco is romanticized by many but what is it really like? While it may be one of the most unaffordable metropolitans in the United States, it does earn it's reputation as the liberal, zany and countercultural center of the world.

In the early 1960s, people began flocking to the Haight/Ashbury area (near Golden Gate Park) because the rent was cheap there at the time. A few notable mentions are Hunter S. Thompson, Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia.

SF Hippie Bus
SF Hippie Bus.jpg

I saw this bus as I was crossing the street and immediately primed my camera. It was tough because I had to turn around fast, properly expose the image and manually focus my lens. Luckily I caught the bus at the most optimal moment as it turned right immediately after I had crossed the road.

SF Skyline
SF Skyline.jpg

This is one of my earliest landscape photos and really shows the expansive scenery of SF. If you look towards the top, you can see the Golden Gate Bridge poking out above the hills.

Have you ever read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?

If not, you definitely should as it's probably the best book ever written on the topic of the counterculture movement in the late 1960s. As a send off to my SF Photography series, below is a famous quote from the book that is often regarded as one of the most important artistic contributions to the San Francisco counterculture movement.

This is the 50th year anniversary of Summer of Love.

“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” (Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)

Part 1: https://steemit.com/photography/@maackel/san-francisco-photography-adventures-part-1

Part 2: https://steemit.com/travel/@maackel/san-francisco-photography-adventures-part-2

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