Historic photos of the Summer of Love—that high watermark of 20th century counterculture that forged the city’s reputation for both left-wing politics and outré personal behavior 50 years ago—are even popping up on street corners now.
Local artists Kate Haug and Ivan Uranga added a signature midcentury flare to the photos now gracing Market Street bus shelters. It’s all part of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s regular poster art series, turning a dozen iconic images from those halcyon days into faux Summer of Love trading cards.
“Trading cards were very popular then; they had them for TV shows, for historical events like World War II, everything,” Haug tells Curbed SF.
“Each of them says ‘five cents,’ but the question is what are these values worth today?” she adds. “A trading card speak to the commodification of that summer and how some of those ideas have become assets with a very different kind of value now.”
How do you pare the lasting legacy of a tumultuous time down to just a dozen images of 13 people? Haug gave us her take on how each one made the cut.
- Ronald Reagan, “Hollywood Governor”
“I’m very interested in liberal California’s relationship with conservative figures. And Reagan is the perfect culmination of commodity and conservative figurehead. I mean, he’s a movie star; he’s literally an image. In this photo he’s actually glad handing a woman in a pillbox hat, as if he’s telling her, ‘You and I, us real Americans, we have a date with destiny.’”
- Bobby Seale, “Black Panther Founder”
“For Seale I wanted an image of a Black Panther who was not getting arrested at the time. I just didn’t want to show an African American man in handcuffs without context, so I wanted atypical Panther images. But everyone and his brother really was being followed by the police and arrested constantly. I went through the library and Chronicle archives looking for any image of Emery Douglas not getting arrested, but it was every single article.”
- Timothy Leary, “Psychedelic Evangelist”
“We went through a lot of iterations of Leary and settled on this one because his hand gesture making this diamond shape alluded to the doors of perception and going into another space. There’s a playfulness about it that we liked.”
- Janis Joplin, “Texas Troubadour”
“We felt the cards were also like a deck of Tarot cards. And this image had a saintliness about Joplin and that lace dress. There were lots of photos of her sitting down and singing, but we went with the one that really showed her face and entire figure.”
- Joan Baez, “Peace Activist”
“The classic image of the Summer of Love is an earthy, partially dressed young woman, which really just reiterates sexism by putting it into a different veneer. It’s not the 1950s housewife sexism anymore, but it’s there. So instead here’s Baez, this really amazing celebrity activist, always getting arrested and very much politically active...”
- Lenore Kandel, “Poet on Trial”
“...and Lenore is a radical feminist poet whose work gets her stuck in an obscenity trial. We wanted to run in opposition of that earthy hippie woman look.”
- Cecil Williams and Janice Mirikitani, “People’s Prophets”
“We went to the GLIDE archive looking for photos of 1967, but this one is actually from a little later. We wanted to show them in a dynamic situation, because we have so much respect and admiration for them and wanted to bring all of their energy into the image. Plus, it’s all about that headband.”
- Jerry Garcia, “Captain Trips”
“This was a much debated photo choice. He’s very widely photographed but not necessarily in 1967. He’s in his zone here, playing the guitar and obscured by his hair, so it represents more of his interior space, his poetry, his own world of performing where he’s not so conscious of the audience.”
- Allen Ginsberg, “Transitional Beat”
“This photo is from the Human Be In in January. That was a lost child, and Ginsberg is holding him up on the stage asking, ‘Who is his parents?’”
- Sonny Barger, “Hells Angels President”
“I felt it was important to address this issue of what an outlaw is. So much of what was happening in 1967 was about who is an outlaw and who isn’t, starting with civil rights and civil disobedience, and then the way war protesters were made criminals, the increased use of marijuana, and so on. And so I thought it was interesting to include these self-identified outlaws.”
- Joan Didion, “Scene Skeptic”
“Didion looks very part of this moment where founds the New Journalism movement. She wrote this amazing essay that’s a very contentious and searing portrait of the Haight and how she’s continually shut out that scene.”
- Sly Stone, “Funk Visionary”
“1967 is still a cusp year. Look at most photos and people are still dressed in cutoffs and peg jeans and surfer shirts with rounded necks and bowl cuts. When you look at photos of Sly when he was a DJ in the city mixing soul with psychedelic rock, he was wearing just a turtleneck and plaid slacks and no natural in his hair. People weren’t quite fully in costume [like this] yet. That was just beginning.”