“I was really just following my nose and watching what was going on”
Ken Light’s photographs of the United States 1969–74
by David Schonauer
In the spring of 1970, when Ken Light went off to photograph the rioting at Ohio State University that followed the US invasion of Cambodia, all he had with him was a Pentax K1000 SLR, a 50mm lens, some rolls of Kodak Tri-X film, a light meter and a gas mask.
Light himself was a student at the time at the University of Ohio in Athens, and he remembers vividly the day he hitchhiked north to Columbus. “I look back on it now and think, ‘Wow, how did I do it?” he says.
Light came of age during one of the most tumultuous eras in American history. He was 18 years in 1969, the year he arrived at college from his home in Long Island, New York. He settled into a campus life in which the pantry raids of the past were giving way to a new social and political activism. Schools across the nation roiled over issues like the addition of Black Studies and Women’s Studies to the curriculum and the presence of military recruiters. Meanwhile, the escalation of the war in Vietnam under newly-elected President Richard Nixon stoked the fire of protest at home.
“I became one of the organizers on campus,” says Light. “But I always had a camera with me — my father was an amateur photographer, so I grew up around cameras. I would take pictures of everything that was going on, to the point where I was getting criticized by my friends. They said, ‘Why are you always taking pictures? You should be protesting.’”
He managed to do both while covering the upheaval at Ohio State.
Besides taking pictures, he was arrested for inciting to riot. After being bailed out by the director of American Civil Liberties Union in Ohio, Light hurried back to Athens, developed his film, made 8 x 10-inch prints and sent them to the Liberation News Service, an anti-war news service distributing material to underground newspapers across the country.
Light kept taking pictures through the following years, covering hippies, yippies, Black Panthers, folk singers, factory workers and others on both sides of the widening gap in American society. Beside the rioting, he covered the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami, where he shot portraits of GOP luminaries like Henry Kissinger and Ronald Reagan, and Nixon’s second inauguration.
“I would love to say that I was a brilliant young photographer and knew exactly what I was doing, but I was really just following my nose and watching what was going on,” he says.
Light went on to become an acclaimed independent social documentary photographer, producing eight books, including Delta Times, a look at rural Black poverty (1995); Texas Death Row, a journey into America’s hardest-working death house (1997); Coal Hollow, which included oral histories about the legacy of coal mining in West Virginia (2005); and Valley of Shadows & Dreams, about the lives of people in California’s Central Valley (2012). For the past 33 years he has been a professor and curator at the Center for Photography at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.
Light’s latest book, What’s Going On: 1969–1974, looks back at the years when his life as a photographer began, and at the America of that time, a nation at war with itself.
If you weren’t there, says Light, you can’t really imagine it. And as he found out, there are those who don’t want to revisit it.
Self-Publishing: A Case Study
When Light first approached publishers with the idea of a book about America during the period, he was, he says, met with general enthusiasm.
“But later, it would become, ‘We’ve seen these pictures before.’ Or, ‘We hate Nixon, so why would we want to do a book that has pictures of Nixon in it?’” Light says. “There would be this shift, and I wondered why. And I began to think that this era, 1969 to 1974, was so divisive in America that people are still afraid to talk about it.”
Today, social disruption comes not so much from college campuses as from Silicon Valley, and Light decided to make the most of it. Faced with rejection from publishers, he turned to Kickstarter and crowdfunded the book project.
“We did a huge amount of social media and emailing about the Kickstarter campaign,” he says. “We set a goal of $30,000, and within 30 days we raised $45,000.”
That, Light says, is when reality of self-publishing set in: “You turn to yourself and say, ‘Damn, now I’ve got to make a book.’”
One important decision he made was to bring in Bonnie Briant, an associate designer with Yolanda Cuomo Design in New York, to help sequence and design the book.
“It was a very different experience from dealing with a publisher to be able to work on my own time with a designer who was very playful and willing to collaborate,” says Light. The book was later printed by the Italian company EBS.
“Then there’s another horrible moment, when you get a call that 175 cases of books are arriving via ship, and where do you want them?” Light notes. Self-publishing, he learned, also means storing, packaging, labeling and mailing books to buyers. “Imagine taking 400 books down to the post office,” he says.
Opening the FBI File
The book opens with copies of notes from Light’s FBI file.
J. Edgar Hoover’s G-Men surveilled the campus organizer but didn’t find much that was incriminating. “Considering the fact that Light is associated with the ‘Underground Press,’ it is felt an interview with him could prove embarrassing to the Bureau,” noted a 1972 memo.
There is a sense of nostalgia in the pages that follow, but What’s Going On is not Light’s version of I Remember the 60s. TV histories of the period are apt to dwell on its music, clothes, hairstyles, sit-ins and acid trips without capturing the profound and often personal divisions in American society — the animosity between parents and their children, the militancy of students calling for revolution and the reaction of what became known as the silent majority.
The era ended and healing happened, though echoes of those culture wars still reverberate. Light calls our relationship with the period “unresolved.”
At the time, he didn’t know he was capturing a portrait of a nation torn in two. “One of the hardest parts of doing the book was finding the story line,” he says. “When I began putting it together, looking through old contact sheets, it all seemed disconnected. These were just pictures of events that I went to. But in the end it was just kind of there, the connection between everything I’d seen. It wasn’t just a book of demonstration photographs — that wouldn’t have interested me. It was a view of both sides of America.”
It was also the story of how Light became a photographer. “As I look back over the arc of time, I have certainly grown wiser and know the world is a far more complicated place than I could ever have imagined as a young man; that change can be slow in coming, and that time flies by,” Light writes in the book. “But in 1969, as an 18-year-old, I had just begun to see the real America. It was at that moment that I began to have a voice through photography, and I wasn’t about to let go of it.”
Originally published by AI-AP. David Schonauer is Editor of Pro Photo Daily, Follow him on Twitter. Follow Pro Photo Daily on Facebook. Sign up for the free Pro Photo Daily Newsletter.
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