Rag Theater - The 2400 Block of Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 1969-1973
Rag Theater - The 2400 Block of Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 1969-1973
illustrations
Unavailable for decades, the photographer has made available new signed copies of both the original paperbound edition and the limited (300 copies), hand-numbered hardbound edition. The hardbound edition was selected by the American Institute of Graphic Arts for its 1976 "Fifty Books" exhibit. *** From Nacio Jan Brown's Notes:
"I was always fascinated by the 2400 block of Telegraph Avenue. On this one segment of one street were flower children and riots, hard drugs and Jesus freaks, left-wing intellectuals and psychedelics, natural foods and runaways. From the time I began to photograph for the underground press in the mid-sixties, I planned to document the life on this block. In 1969 I started. I felt that the counterculture was beginning to fragment. While most people on the block still identified more with each other than with those outside, tension was increasing and things were changing fast." *** From Thomas Farber's Foreword: "Nacio Jan Brown's photographs stop time and record this circle of life he knows so well, saving it from the too-quick and too-dead past for us to view with new eyes. Yet even as, through the grace of his commitment to this block, we take in what is already long gone, surely the lives continue, and, though nothing remains the same, surely right now, at this very moment, the block is alive, hustlers running their games, dogs darting through traffic, junkies yearning to score, regulars at their appointed tables in the Mediterraneum taking in the endless changes while waiting for the apocalypse, and the children dancing by, bantering, teasing, mimicking, testing, testing, looking over their shoulders to see if anyone is watching, to see if anyone is there." *** Nacio Jan Brown is a photojournalist whose work has been published widely and is represented in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, NYC, George Eastman House at Rochester, and many private collectors.