What’s Going On? 1969 – 1974 by Ken Light

Ken Light’s monograph of his earliest photos from 1969 to 1974 document the social landscape of America as it roiled with upheaval. He began as a participant in the youth movement and then became an observer of the entire spectrum of the cultural and political wars in America. Light crisscrossed the country with youthful passion and a yearning to explain his country to himself, asking, “What’s going on?”

Throwing back tear gas, Cambodian invasion riot, Columbus, Ohio. © Ken Light.
Throwing back tear gas, Cambodian invasion riot, Columbus, Ohio. © Ken Light.

Along the way, his frontline photos documented people across race, class and political lines. The resulting portrait is more than a flashback. It is a unique and important historical record that counteracts the truncated memory of the sixties that has been inserted into our psyche by both editorial and commercial media. Like a Pavlovian response, the Sixties conjures up images of young people smoking pot, dancing high on LSD to rock music in the park. In fact, those years weren’t like that at all for much of America.

His journey through America opens with teenagers at the beach with their transistor radio lying next to them. We see the quiet before the storm: high school students with their Eisenhower textbook, retired people playing cards and cafeteria workers quietly striking. We feel the pent up tension with no outlet. And then, suddenly the new, alternative worldview bursts forth. We follow this rupture, the Vietnam Moratorium, Republican Convention, riots, POWs coming home, until the end of the era when Nixon resigns.

Somersault, West Oakland, California. © Ken Light.
Somersault, West Oakland, California. © Ken Light.

What’s Going On? shows the gritty, home truth of the working class trying to keep a toehold on the American Dream as wages began to stagnate, and unions weakened. It shows how college students, informed by the media about government policies in Vietnam became disillusioned and then empowered to protest. And, the book shows how divided the United States was politically as the new, more egalitarian world order was foisted upon it.

In the spirit of the sixties, this book was published through crowdfunding on Kickstarter, allowing Light complete control over the production of the book. His extensive experience publishing eight of his own monographs with Aperture, the Smithsonian Institution Press, the UC Press as well as managing the publication of books by Sebastião Salgado, Wayne Miller and Larry Fink, was brought to bear on this publication.

 

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About Ken Light

Peace fingers, May Day demonstration, Washington, D.C. © Ken Light.
Peace fingers, May Day demonstration, Washington, D.C. © Ken Light.

Ken Light is a social documentary photographer whose work has appeared in books, magazines, exhibitions and numerous anthologies, exhibition catalogues and a variety of media, digital and motion picture. Light got his start in 1969 photographing for alternative newspapers and magazines. His photographs from this period were widely published in posters, books and hundreds of periodicals.

Prior to this publication, his next most recent book, Valley of Shadows & Dreams (Heyday Book) was published in 2012, with work featured in the New York Times, Newsweek/Daily Beast, N.Y. Review of Books, Huffington Post Voces. His book was Coal Hollow (University of California Press) was published in 2005, and presents arresting black and white photographs and powerful oral histories that chronicle the legacy of coalmining in southern West Virginia.

Ken Light is a Professor and curator of the Center for Photography at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California Berkeley, and was the 2012 Laventhol Visiting Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has taught workshops at many school and photo festivals including at the ICP in New York City, The Missouri Photo Workshop, S.F. Art Institute and in the School for Photographic Studies in Prague and Baltimore. He was a founder of the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography, which awarded grants to photographers worldwide, as well as founder of Fotovision a non-profit documentary photo organisation based in the San Francisco bay Area. His freelance work has been represented by J.B. Pictures, SABA Press Photos in New York. He is currently represented by Contact Press Images.