Irwin Klein And The New Settlers: Photographs Of Conterculture In New Mexico by: Hip Chris

Just in time for the 20th Anniversary of Hippy.com we are happy to announce the publication of a book about Hippie Culture from the 1960s in New Mexico.

“When my late uncle Irwin Klein first came to El Rito, a Hispaño village located at the edge of Carson National Forest, in 1966, the “great hippie migration” to northern New Mexico was underway. Before the end of the decade hundreds of “dropouts, renegades, and utopians,” in Klein’s words, and the “children of the urban middle class” had made their way to the region.

While some of these new arrivals settled in El Rito, Vallecitos, Dixon, and Taos, others went to live at New Buffalo, Magic Tortoise, Five Star, and other communes. Northern New Mexico figured prominently on the countercultural map. Wavy Gravy announced the establishment of the Hog Farm commune at Llaño from the stage at Woodstock in August 1969.

Easy Rider (1969) introduced audiences to the burgeoning scene when the two protagonists, Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy the Kid (Dennis Hopper) visit an unnamed commune near Taos on their ill-fated journey across the United States. The cover story for Rolling Stone for July 9, 1970 proclaimed it the “Summer of New Mexico.”

~Benjamin Klein, editor of “Irwin Klein And The New Settlers: Photographs Of Conterculture In New Mexico”

Why New Mexico? The author, Benjamin Klein, offers the answers in a book of photographs on hippies and the counterculture taken by his uncle Irwin Klein back in the day.

Irwin Klein and the New Settlers: Photographs of Conterculture in New Mexico was published in June, 2016. It was edited by Benjamin Klein who teaches European and world history at California State University.

Irwin Klein originally selected 80 photographs for publication, and wrote an introduction. Irwin Klein passed in 1974, and now his photo essay has been published for the first time in its entirety by the University of Nebraska Press.

The publisher notes: The work of Irwin Klein (1933–74) is archived in the permanent collections of the George Eastman House, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives in Santa Fe.

“This is an evocative photo essay of the early counterculture in New Mexico. Excellent images that are enlightening.”—John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War and If Mountains Die: A New Mexico Memoir.

The book is available in hardcover for $29.95 from the University of Nebraska Press.

https://nebraskapress…ers,677138.aspx

Jonah Raskin says about this book: If nothing else, Irwin Klein and the New Settlers shows that at the apex of the Sixties, hippies were everywhere and not just in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury and New York’s Lower East Side.

The publisher states this is an “important contribution to the literature of the counterculture and especially the 1960s.”

“Dropouts, renegades, utopians. Children of the urban middle class and old beatniks living alone, as couples, in families, or as groups in the small Nuevomexicano towns. When photographer Irwin Klein began visiting northern New Mexico in the mid-1960s, he found these self-proclaimed New Settlers—and many others—in the back country between Santa Fe and Taos. His black-and-white photographs captured the life of the counterculture’s transition to a social movement. His documentation of these counterculture communities has become well known and sought after for both its sheer beauty and as a primary source about a largely undocumented group.”

Added: July 7th 2016
Reviewer: Hip Chris
Score:
Related Link: Visit this link to see some images.
Hits: 5137