In 1969, two bikers took to the road in search of freedom in Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider and became emblematic subjects of the New Hollywood. Forty years later, the city of Taos celebrates this fictional duo and the world they encountered off the grid with the Summer of Love festival. Flower children, diggers, dropouts, and day-trippers convene through September in the city for music, film, art, and more. Singing along to Buffalo Springfield, I was transported back in time by the “Hippy Dippy Parade”—a groovy march down the town’s main drag that culminated, for many, in a visit to Lisa Law’s photography exhibition. Fresh off the parade route, Law’s handpainted bus was parked outside the Taos Center for the Arts. Inside, her color and black-and-white prints recalled an era of free love and “simple taste,” a revolution that peacefully raged from San Francisco’s 1967 Human Be-In to the New Buffalo Commune in Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, and all the way to the 1969 festival in Woodstock. While Law’s subjects include the expected cultural heavy-hitters such as Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Timothy Leary, the most magnetic images in this exhibition are those that chronicle her family life and intimate relationships, including her daughter Pilar in the bathtub or asleep in a homemade cradle board. One gets the sense here that with the help of her camera, Law found what the youth of those years were seeking—happiness and community. Lucky for viewers, she was savvy enough to know it was an era worth capturing on film.
