A Saskatchewan company is helping uncover a decades-old mystery involving thousands of photographs documenting San Francisco’s counterculture movement in the 1960s.
The collection was captured by an unknown photographer who documented a transformative period in the city’s history, including anti-war protests, psychedelic rock concerts and some of the era’s most recognizable cultural figures.
“I always had a hint that this might have been a solitary individual, someone who somehow had the presence of mind to shoot but didn’t seem to show an interest in publishing,” said Bill Delzell, president of SpeakLocal.
The collection was discovered decades ago, abandoned in a San Francisco storage locker. In addition to thousands of slides never seen before are eighty rolls of unprocessed film.
An Indian Head company that specializes in developing old film, Film Rescue, will now unravel the mystery of what’s on them and perhaps the identify of the unknown photographer.
“That collection is really something special because it shows history itself and that’s why we are so proud to have this collection here,” said film archivist Gerald Freyer.
The collection is considered significant. It includes photos of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg and musicians like Carlos Santana and Jerry Garcia on the back of a truck rolling into Golden Gate park to perform a concert.
Over the years, the collection has been handed down from one collector to the next but no one had the resources to process the undeveloped film. It’s now in the hands of a San Francisco nonprofit called SpeakLocal which is intent on completing the story.
