The Sixties

The photographer Richard Avedon and the writer Doon Arbus began collaborating on this book thirty years ago.  The photographs and interviews they did then remain faithful to what was, like the contents of a time capsule.

Meeting somebody and balling them means something, but it doesn't mean near as much as it used to.   --Janis Joplin, September 1969

In a society where there is institutionalized oppression, the thing is to catch government and business in the grass--actually humping.  --Florynce Kennedy, August 1969

I was so afraid of being bad and being caught at it.  --Dr. Benjamin Spock, September 1969

The connection between all the rhetoric and all the poetry, between the words of a Black Panther and those of a rock star or a pacifist, between the scars of a pop artist and those of a napalm victim, have haunted and informed the structuring of this book, with its own peculiar version of a beginning, a middle, and an end.

RICHARD AVEDON (b. 1923) was the editor, with his classmate James Baldwin, of The Magpie, the literary magazine at De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx.  In 1942 he joined the photography department of the U.S. merchant marine.  He was a staff photographer at I>Harper's Bazaar (1951-1965) and Vogue (1966-1988), and he collaborated with James Baldwin on Nothing Personal (1964), a book about the civil rights movement.  In 1992 he became the first staff photographer at The New Yorker.

DOON ARBUS (b. 1945) is the author of Alice in Wonderland: The Forming of a Company, the Making of a Play, and has written for a number of magazines, including Rolling Stone and The Nation.  Her thirty-year collaboration with Richard Avedon began with the project that has become this book.  She is completing her Unfinished Novel.