People of Telegraph Ave, Berkeley 1969-1973

 

One picture changed everything. In the 1960s, Nacio Jan Brown was a photographer for the San Francisco Express Times, an underground weekly newspaper. Typically, he would sit in Caffe Mediterraneum on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and wait for something to happen. One day, nothing did. So he left the cafe, and on the way out he spotted a girl sat on a chair eating a hardboiled egg. He took her photograph. That was the picture that changed things.

“I thought, ‘I’m going to do a book on the street scene on one block of Telegraph Avenue, just based upon having taken this one picture,'” he says.  The pictures became the book Rag Theater: The 2400 Block of Telegraph Avenue 1969-1973 and then the website. Many of his portraits were taken by Rag Theatre, a fashion store. “Bell bottoms, the whole deal,” says Brown, “early ’70s embarrassing clothes.”

 

 

Brown stopped shooting on Telegraph in 1973. “There came a time when I just couldn’t shoot anymore,” he says. He saw that hard drugs, exploitation and nihilism had replaced weed, spontaneity and people who believed they could form a new society. Many of the kids of Telegraph died young.

 

 

“Looking at the work now, forty years later, I am struck by the feeling that what I have resembles nothing so much as a family album. The people in the photographs are people’s parents and grandparents, their brothers and sisters, their friends. Most were young at the time of the photographs. Some—too many—never got much older. Along with the recognition that I have in my possession a family album came a feeling of responsibility to share it.”

– Nacio Jan Brown

 

 

“There is a sense in which this kind of photography involves taking something from people without giving them something in return. People reveal something to me, however subtle, which they would normally reserve for those much closer to them. My photographs then show this to others. But this is not so simple. Long after the moment of exposure, when the incident has been forgotten by the subject, I am confronted by it again and again—on the negative, on contact sheets, on proofs, and in prints. The images in this book have become my family. My feelings about them run too deep to be expressed objectively. The notes that follow may seem technical or detached, but they reflect my thoughts when I look at the images now. My feelings about the people then must be in the photographs themselves.”

– Nacio Jan Brown, April 1975

 

 

“There was this sort of exuberant innocence in ’69 that was completely gone by ’72 or ’73. This energetic life got overshadowed by the drug scene.”

– Nacio Jan Brown