Digger Movement
Photo & Video
Galleries
"In The Clear" (SF Chronicle blurb and photo by Bob Campbell, Nov 30
1966, pg. 1)
The visual dimension of history has taken precedence over the
typographic dimension since the invention of photography. Here is a
catalog of the visual images that were produced by and/or about the
Digger Movement of the 1960s and beyond.
Contents
Photographs are vital inclusions in an archive. Whereas the manifestos
and leaflets can help us understand the ideas that quickened the spirit,
the outward dress and appearance can speak volumes of how that spirit
manifested itself.
We have several galleries of photos here. (But always looking for
more.)
- Digger Photo Gallery (new
series, 2019). Contributions welcome.
- The Miriam Bobkoff Gallery of
Intercommunal Photographs is an
archive that Miriam Bobkoff shot of the Scott Street
Commune and the Kaliflower network of communes from 1971-74. [Added 26
Jan 2016]
- The Loren Sears Gallery has two
videos that Loren produced which show the Haight-Ashbury's hippie
community in early 1967: the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park in January,
1967; and, a "Home Tribal Video" that Loren shot in San Francisco.
We have the following galleries of screen shots from various films:
Even thirty years after, the 'persistence of the counterculture' is
still readily evident:
- The Photo Gallery for the Thirtieth Anniversary
of the Human Be-In, though not strictly images of historical
Digger events, nevertheless provides evidence of the persistence of
the counter culture which the Diggers were instrumental in creating. These
photos also add the dimension of color where many of the photos from 1966-67
are black/white.
A sampling of two photographers who were there:
- The Gene Anthony gallery of Digger photos is a compilation of
low-resolution images found on various web sites that this consummate
photographer shot from the early stages of the Digger movement.
- William Gedney was an East Coast photographer who received a
Guggenheim fellowship to travel America and shoot images that caught his
eye. He ended up in San Francisco within a few weeks of the startup of
Free Food in the Panhandle in October, 1966. His work was mostly still
in negative form, waiting for the processing of his posthumous
collection some day, until recently. Check out the updated and
vastly expanded set of galleries that depict the early history of
the San Francisco Diggers. (Updated Sept 2022)
NBC Bay Area produced an hour-long documentary about the Summer of
Love as part of the Revelations series. It aired twice in June, 2017.
- One of the segments of the film
highlighted the Diggers and featured an interview with Vicki Pollack
who had joined the Diggers in early 1967 after arriving from New York.
In this interview, Vicki presents an articulate description of the
attraction that the Digger vision offered to young people who had been
drawn to the Haight-Ashbury. Peter Coyote narrates the film and this
segment.
Starting with the project in 1980 to salvage Nowsreal (the film that
the Diggers produced in 1968), the Digger Archives has collected the
following films and videos that document the period, the people, and the
events that constitute this historical narrative.
Videos (oldest to most recent)
If anyone has photographs or videos that they would like to donate to the
Digger Archives, please contact the
curator.
This project is never done, it just moves toward a state of Furthur
Completion. There will be a Miscellany gallery of photographs that have turned up over the
years, not by any one photographer, but with images both iconic and
mundane. |
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