Across the Great Divide: A Photo Chronicle of the Counterculture
I love this book! Don t be fooled by the scholarly foreword. These photos, and Roberta Price s stories, capture the essential, on-the-edge, winging-it, playing-for-keeps creativity and sacrificial dedication of 1960s communards. She lived it and recorded the by-products of the enormous liberation of energy generated by following one's personal visions of authenticity and ethics. I knew some of these folks, lived on communes identical in character, and visited many others. Her account is true. I wrote a book hoping to capture the complexity, poverty, joy, chaos and freedom of this life. I think Roberta's done a better job. I won t even lend my copy for fear of losing it. --Peter Coyote, actor, author of Sleeping Where I FallIn direct, engagingly understated photographs and charmingly level-headed prose, Roberta Price affectionately recalls and puts into context the lives of a group of new American pioneers who optimistically returned to the land at the end of the 1960s. Herself an energetic part of that adventure, she is a charming and truthful witness to that time, those hopes, their hard work and rustic surroundings. --Gordon Baldwin, photographs curator and former Associate Curator of Photographs, the J. Paul Getty MuseumPrice's understated, almost journalistic foray is lit by warmth, humor, and the abundant tenderness of her subjects; the photographs function as part family album (Price herself called a commune her home for seven years), part countercultural slide show, part lesson in American history....If at first glimpse, these images appear as familiar images of hippie culture, a closer look reveals nuance and idiosyncrasy. Characters recur, a story begins to emerge, and the work unfurls into a profound exploration that touches on ethnography. --Publishers WeeklyRoberta Price's stunning book delivers the past with a wallop. It is at once a work of history and memory with none of the anthropological detachment that frequently characterizes interrogations of this period. Price has succeeded in capturing the energy and the often underestimated ambitiousness of the whole countercultural project. Her images have an immediacy and power that returned me (full disclosure: I was there) to that peak historical moment during which some of us imagined we could remake the world. --Mary F. Corey, cultural historian and author, University of California, Los Angeles