Manitoba has a hippie movement
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Posted 11 months ago
WINNIPEG — Forty years after the summer of love, a never-before-seen collection of photographs of Manitoba’s hippie movement is being published by University of Manitoba Press. “All Our Changes: Images of the Sixties Generation” by internationally acclaimed Winnipeg photographer Gerry Kopelow will be launched at 7:30 p.m., Oct. 15, at McNally Robinson Booksellers (Grant Park Mall location). The launch will feature a live author interview with Doug Smith, a photo slide show and refreshments.
The collection contains 160 black and white photographs taken in Winnipeg, Toronto, and Ottawa between 1967 and 1975 and is a veritable “Who’s Who” of Winnipeg baby boomers. It includes early photos from the Winnipeg Folk Festival, the Niverville Pop Festival (yes, Niverville had its own festival!), Man-Pop, Mariposa, and Festival Express; along with photos of the not yet famous Joni Mitchell, Guess Who, Stan Rogers, Valdy, Harlequin, Chilliwack, Gettysbyrg Address, the Electric Jug & Blues Band, the Logan Avenue Comfort Station and The Fifth. But more than just who was on stage, the book captures hundreds of Winnipeg teens hanging out, protesting and “feeling groovy.”
Gerry Kopelow, a widely published veteran photographer specializing in architectural photography and photography of the performing arts, came of age in the late 1960s. A self-described outsider, Kopelow discovered photography in junior high thanks to a Grade 8 teacher who gave him a camera as a last resort in her efforts to cheer him up.
By high school, the Grant Park student was traveling regularly to Ottawa during Christmas and spring break to sell photographs to the National Film Board’s Still Photography division. Like the character William Miller in the movie “Almost Famous,” he was by far the youngest photographer the NFB had ever dealt with. In 1970, he was given the assignment to shoot youth culture, so with camera in hand, he hit the road heading east to Toronto and Ottawa to capture the people, protests and music festivals that so defined his generation.
“My cohorts were doing things that I found interesting,” says Kopelow. “I guess we shared this investigative tone. The whole hippie thing was an aspect of that — we were trying to order the world in a more harmonious way. It was kind of sweet, really, when you look at it. Here was this particular bubble when a lot of people changed. Nowadays it’s thought of as quaint, cute, and silly, which it was. But there were aspects of this era which were, I hesitate to use the word, noble, but were much more authentic, much more profound, and worth looking at. It turns out that’s what I was collecting during that period. I know it’s a narrow slice of what went on, but we can only be in one place at a time.”
Following his Winnipeg launch, Kopelow will be heading out on tour to Toronto and Ottawa the week of Oct. 20. He will be back in Winnipeg in November for a public lecture and slide show at noon on Nov. 12, at the Millennium Library in the Carol Shields auditorium.
Gerry Kopelow is an internationally acclaimed photographer who lectures at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York. He is a consultant for Canon USA and has published seven previous books on photography. He operates a photography studio in Winnipeg and lives in Dugald.
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