American communal experiments of the late 1960s and 1970s developed amid varied political, cultural and personal concerns. Opposition to war, dissatisfaction with conventional work and interest in alternative social arrangements were among the themes associated with the period, but no single experience explains everyone who joined a community.
The term commune covers different arrangements of shared housing, work, resources and belief. Some groups pursued agricultural self-sufficiency, while others maintained businesses or organized around religious commitments. The photographs below need those distinctions rather than a single romantic account of leaving society behind.
As University of Kansas professor Timothy Miller said, “reason had run its course; now it was time to return to the mystical and intuitional…the hippies rejected the industrial for the agrarian, the plastic for the natural, the synthetic for the organic.”
Each hippie commune was different: some were deeply religious communities while others were completely secular. Drug use was rampant in some hippie communes and forbidden on others. Some were strictly self-sufficient agrarian societies, but other hippie communes participated in capitalism–owning businesses and selling rock albums. There was no “one-size fits all” model, and each hippie commune developed its own culture, rules, and personality over time.
By the 1980s, the original fascination surrounding hippie communes had largely faded, and they began dropping off the map. These photographs document selected communities during that period. They are not a current census of surviving communes, and photographs are not the only records through which their histories can be studied.
One of the most interesting (and strangest) communes to come out of the 70s was the Source Family.
The Source Family was the brainchild WWII vet turned martial arts expert turned Hollywood restauranteur turned spiritual leader, Jim Baker, or Father Yod, as he preferred to be called.
The Source Family did not practice intentional poverty like members of the Farm. They were “entrepreneurial hippies,” and they opened a vegetarian restaurant in Los Angeles.
The Source Family became well known for their unusual living arrangements, curious antics, and long flowing hair. They became media darlings of the day.
Father Yod died in a freak hang-gliding accident in 1975 in Hawaii. The Source Family fell apart soon after his death.
The Source Family Band practiced every morning at 3AM. Together they recorded more than 60 limited-pressing records of psychedelic rock chants and prayers
The 2015 account described Father Yod’s relationships with multiple women and criticism of his conduct. Those claims require careful sourcing; dismissive language about the women’s appearance does not help explain the community’s power relationships.
The commune was founded by 13 hippies who, tired of the Vietnam war and constant police brutality of the mainland, fled to this island paradise.
The commune got off to a rocky start when all members and their children were arrested for vagrancy.
They built their beachfront tree houses out of anything they could find: bamboo, scrap lumber, and salvaged materials.
Taylor Camp’s ocean-front setting has often invited an idyllic reading. The photographs do not establish that its residents lived without rules, conflict or practical obligations, and a fuller history needs the experiences of the people involved.
Clothing was highly optional at Taylor Camp
Sources: Talesmaze, All That Is Interesting via The Open Mind
Related:
- John Lennon’s Imagine in Comic Form
- A Short Comic About Love and Everyday Care
- A Reflection on Choices, Consequences and Comparison
Shared living took more than one form
A shared home does not automatically mean shared beliefs about everything else. The communities in this collection approached work, money and religion in different ways. That variety makes the photographs more interesting than a single nostalgic picture of a hippie lifestyle, with everyone imagined to be living by the same rules.
The practical questions sit just outside many photographs: who prepares the food, how the bills are paid, and what happens when people disagree. A gathering can convey companionship without revealing how a community makes decisions. The accompanying accounts help bring those arrangements into view. They also belong to particular periods in each group’s history; a photograph cannot establish how a place operates today. Seen together, the images suggest a range of attempts to organise daily life differently, each with its own people and circumstances. The common idea of sharing leaves plenty of room for very different experiments.
Explore a related story: Skopje 2014: Monumental Design and a Disputed Historical Narrative.
What a group photograph cannot show
A communal meal or gathering makes togetherness easy to photograph. Decision-making, uneven responsibilities and disagreements are less likely to be visible in the same frame. Written accounts and participants’ recollections can therefore change the meaning of an attractive image. The collection is strongest as a set of particular experiments in daily life, with room for both attachment and criticism in how they are remembered.
Always wonder how the lifes of all those hippies developed since then ?
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