Along the way, these 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.
This 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, POW’s coming home, until the end of the era when Nixon resigns.
What’s Going On? shows the gritty, down 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.
This portrait of America will make many of us smile as long forgotten memories are stirred, and will remind us that so much of the turmoil we are experiencing today is because we have not yet absorbed the cataclysmic changes brought about in the sixties.
BOOK
Ken Light : What’s going on? 1969 – 1974
Light Squared Media
Hardcover, 196 pages
9.1 x 6.6 x 1.1 inches
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0692476601
ISBN-13: 978-0692476604
$55
http://www.kenlight.com
The book can be ordered at squareup.com/market/kenlight-photo
