LISA LAW
Over the past four decades her still, movie and video images have chronicled the social and cultural changes in America, from her film documentary of that vibrant ’60s, to her moving contemporary still photographs of the indigenous people of north, south, and Central America as they struggle for sovereignty and survival.
‘Flashing On The Sixties’ won 4 major awards at film festivals upon its release and it has been enjoyed by millions of viewers on Cinemax and The Discovery Channel and PBS from 1991 to 1994. Now you can buy it here on DVD. Actor-director Dennis Hopper described ‘Flashing On The Sixties’ as “the most compelling, moving documentary of the Sixties”.
Lisa’s book, of the same title, is now in its 4th edition, published by Square Books. The book is a unique pictorial record of the Sixties, reflecting Lisa’s indefatigable search for memorable human images. Her film documentation of “Woodstock” has been used in more than twenty-five news and documentary presentations honoring many anniversaries of that historical event where she had spent most of her time feeding over 200,000 people with the Hog Farm. Her last book, ‘Interviews with Icons, Flashing On The Sixties’ was released February 2000 by Lumen Press and has received sterling reviews across the nation.
Her career as a photographer began in the early sixties. With a new Honeywell Pentax camera in hand and working as an assistant to a manager in the rock and roll scene she began taking pictures. Whether she was backstage with The Beatles, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Kingston Trio, Otis Redding, The Lovin Spoonful, The Velvet Underground, The Byrds, taking promotional photographs of Janis Joplin and Big Brother, or at home making dinner for house guests like Bob Dylan or Andy Warhol or helping feed hundreds of thousands at Woodstock with the Hog Farm Commune, her passion for photography grew into a profession as she sported her new Nikon F.
In the mid-Sixties she lived with the “Mushroom” people of Huautla, Oaxaca, Mexico, capturing the essence of this endangered culture as she became friends with Maria Sabina who she photographed for her book ‘La sabia de los hongos’. Moving to San Francisco in 1967, she chronicled the life of the flower children in Haight Ashbury. She carried her camera wherever she went, to the Human Be-In and the anti-Vietnam march in San Francisco, Monterey Pop Festival, and meetings of the Diggers. She then joined those who migrated to the communes of New Mexico in the late Sixties and early Seventies. In 2012 she donated 58 of her photographs of the Woodstock Festival to the Bethel Woods Museum for their permanent collection. Her photos of Wavy Gravy, and Ram Dass are used consistently today in many books and documentaries.
Since that time, Lisa has specialized in documenting history as she has experienced it. As a mother, writer, photographer and social activist, her work reveals distinctive communities of people, including homeless of San Francisco, the El Salvadorians resistance against military oppression, and the Navajo and Hopi nations struggling to preserve their ancestral religious sites, traditions and land. She uses her camera as a powerful weapon to champion the rights of indigenous nations, bringing to a wide audience riveting insights into their cultures just as she did during the social revolution of the Sixties.
As a photographer/documentarian, Lisa’s perspective is rare and unique. From the reservations of Arizona and New Mexico to the Mansions of Beverly Hills she is welcomed as a friend and participant thus allowing her images to reflect a sense intimacy and spontaneity that is rarely seen by “outsiders”.
Lisa lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico in an adobe house surrounded by a vegetable garden, fruit trees, a tipi, and her hippie bus Silver. She spends most of her time working with her photographs and visiting with her children and five grandchildren. Here dream is to create the Museum of the sixties in Santa Fe so that she can share her images of both the Sixties and New Mexico and her 60s art collection, a museum that will honor the memory of those times forever.