The work of Irwin Klein (1933–74) is archived in the permanent collections of the George Eastman House, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives in Santa Fe. Benjamin Klein, Irwin’s nephew, teaches European and world history at California State University, East Bay. His articles on the counterculture have appeared in the New Mexico Historical Review and Casa Vogue.
“This is an evocative photo essay of the early counterculture in New Mexico. Excellent images that are enlightening.”—John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War and If Mountains Die: A New Mexico Memoir “[This book] reveals Irwin Klein as a perceptive interpreter of the countercultural movement as it played out in northern New Mexico in the late 1960s. Klein’s photographs of the New Settlers, which he referred to as ‘part family album’ . . . complement his grittier, darker New York City photos taken at roughly the same time, showing Klein to be an unheralded chronicler of American life.”—Stephen C. Pinson, curator, Department of Photographs, Metropolitan Museum of Art “Visually stunning. . . . Given the rarity and beauty of its photographs and its lively and accessible commentary, this work will be of value to sixties and communal studies scholars, regional and visual historians, archivists, photography enthusiasts, and anyone with a rebel’s heart.”—Gretchen Lemke, author of Daughters of Aquarius “A bevy of telling black-and-white images that provides the viewer with the opportunity to almost become the settler’s neighbor or the proverbial fly on the wall. . . . A worthy, elegant body of work emerges.”—Robert Altman, former chief staff photographer for Rolling Stone and author of The Sixties “No one captured the spirit and essence of the ’60s southwest American communes better than Irwin Klein. With a Leica, black-and-white film, and natural lighting, he created an authentic artistic record of this unique and short-lived period of back-to-the-land ’60s idealism.”—Lloyd Kahn, editor of Shelter Publications, Inc. “Irwin Klein’s photographs masterfully illuminate facets of life in northern New Mexico’s countercultural communes of the 1960s and 1970s. They capture the hippies’ celebration of life and love and their rejection of convention and materialism, as well as their progression from fanciful dreaming to the realities of subsistence farming in a starkly beautiful but unforgiving, hardscrabble setting. The accompanying interpretive essays enhance the value of the photographs by offering historical, cultural, and artistic insights.”—Brian Cannon, director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies
