BRATTLEBORO — One part of Vermont’s rich and varied cultural history is owed to its hippie generation of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Vermont was a veritable Utopia for all who followed the era’s back-to-the-land movement and decided to come to Vermont to live organically on communes and self-made farms.
Rebecca Lepkoff and Peter Simon, two famous photographers whose work captured the spirit, people and endeavors of the time, will be featured at the Vermont Center for Photography this week at Gallery Walk.
“The subjects [of my photography] are the hippies in Pike Falls Road, Jamaica, Vermont, 1970, mostly in the summer/early fall,” Lepkoff said. “Some were friends of mine and some I got to know while they were living there.”
Lepkoff had many positive things to say about the people she knew in Pike Falls and the back-to-nature lifestyle that they chose.
“They were really idealistic people. They made a beautiful garden with natural organic gardening. They had a natural swimming hole, and would go swimming there. They loved the body and used to go swimming in the morning or sun themselves or work in the garden, and they would do t’ai chi.”
But when winter came, “it was kind of hard for them,” Lepkoff recalls. “Most of them were living in hunter shacks, so they had to get wood stoves and feed them to warm themselves up. They were really into vegetarian food and healthful living — really nice, poetic people.”
She also got to know Helen and Scott Nearing, who founded the back-to-the-land movement and had many followers during that period.
“Our house was a mile away from Scott and Helen Nearing,” she said. “Scott himself had a history of political activity. Lots of people would come and live his style of being close to the earth.”
Lepkoff is a well-known photographer, and has been since the 1940s. Though most of her work can be found in New York City museums, she has spent summers in Vermont since 1950. She moved from Jamaica to Brattleboro three years ago, where she discovered and made her work available to the Center of Photography.
“I went in and introduced myself and they asked me to bring some photographs. This summer I said, ‘I have a group of photos of the hippies of Vermont.’ They said in coordination with another group of hippies, I’m sharing the show. It just sort of naturally happened. I have exhibited in New York City and some museums have my photographs, also some in France. It was natural for me to gravitate to a photo gallery.”
One of Lepkoff’s two books, Life on the Lower East Side, features New York City photos. The other, Almost Utopia, about where the Nearings lived, was published by the Vermont Historical Society.
“The book is called Almost Utopia because the people stayed for a long time and gave up, couldn’t quite live there forever,” she said.
Lepkoff has shown her photography at the VCP twice before. “One was [of] Vermont people, the other was photos of New York City,” she said.
Life on 80 acres
Peter Simon, a Martha’s Vineyard photographer of national acclaim whose photographs have documented everything from rock stars to the peace movement in the 1960s, had a more interpersonal experience from 1970 to 1972, when he and a friend from college took “a little inherited money” and bought their own 80-acre farm, a “hippie commune” they called Tree Frog Farm.
“Most of the people who went there were friends from Boston University,” Simon said. “It was the thing to do at the time for dropouts from mainstream society — grow your own food, milk your own cows, live as simple a life as possible.”
“I came from a fairly upscale background, so it wasn’t easy for me to make that shift!” he said. “Photos from that era are all about my life on the commune,” he added, noting that the photos in the exhibit were taken in 1968, “a special time of my life.”
His favorite image, he said, is one of Ellen Snyder Curley on the cover of Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times with Liberation News Service, by commune member Raymond Mungo. Another favorite was taken at that exact spot as well, he said — “a picture of my girlfriend and a circular tire. She’s in a position that makes it look like the yin-yang symbol. It’s the cover of my first published book, Moving On/Holding Still, in 1972.”
Simon is grateful that he was able to capture that particular part of his life and Vermont’s history through his work, and he remains modest about his skill back in the 1970s.
“I wasn’t that good, the way I am now,” he said. “I was still learning my craft. The pictures do have a very timeless quality to them. I’m glad I was able to document the time when I did. I was just doing family photos, but I knew I was documenting a special time of life. The era was full of hippie optimism, [a desire to] change the world and do the right thing. There was a moral decision to make life simpler and more communal, to share and be less greedy. It was a time when everyone wanted to simplify.”
Simon, who will attend the opening Friday, has published a book of his photography called I and Eye: Pictures of My Generation, which will be available at the Center for Photography during this week’s Gallery Walk. This will be the first time his work has been shown at the VCP.
Back to the land, back in the gallery
Jennifer Hobbs, who works at the Center for Photography and runs her own studio, said her older siblings were a part of the “Back to the Land” movement, and she is familiar with many of the citizens of Brattleboro and the area who also took part.
“I know a lot of people who were involved in that period. My sister actually was going to Marlboro College in the 1960s, and a lot of my friends spent time on these farms,” she said.
“If you look at our community in general, there are a lot of people who emigrated to Vermont in the late sixties. They wanted to live close to the land and have a different social environment. There are many people who are now lawyers and accountants who were ‘back to the landers.’”
Hobbs explained that the gallery is committee-run, and photographers both local and national are invited to exhibit their work.
“It’s a wonderful nonprofit gallery,” she said. “It has changing exhibits every month, with really exciting shows from both local and national photographers. All our shows are free and open to the public.”
Hobbs recognized the personal impact that this month’s exhibit by Lepkoff and Simon will have on whoever comes to see the photography.
“This particular exhibit is going to be exciting for the people to come and see, because they may recognize friends and neighbors in the images. It’s going to be a really fun show,” she said.