Up
Digger Photo Gallery
Bobkoff Gallery
Loren Sears Gallery
30th Anniversary
Gene Anthony
William Gedney
Free City Puppets
Revelations
Local News Videos

Digger Movement
Photo & Video
Galleries


"In The Clear" (SF Chronicle blurb and photo by Bob Campbell, Nov 30 1966, pg. 1)

The visual dimension of history has taken precedence over the typographic dimension since the invention of photography. Here is a catalog of the visual images that were produced by and/or about the Digger Movement of the 1960s and beyond.

Contents

Photo Galleries

Photographs are vital inclusions in an archive. Whereas the manifestos and leaflets can help us understand the ideas that quickened the spirit, the outward dress and appearance can speak volumes of how that spirit manifested itself.

We have several galleries of photos here. (But always looking for more.)

  • Digger Photo Gallery (new series, 2019). Contributions welcome.
  • The Miriam Bobkoff Gallery of Intercommunal Photographs is an archive that Miriam Bobkoff shot of the Scott Street Commune and the Kaliflower network of communes from 1971-74. [Added 26 Jan 2016]
  • The Loren Sears Gallery has two videos that Loren produced which show the Haight-Ashbury's hippie community in early 1967: the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park in January, 1967; and, a "Home Tribal Video" that Loren shot in San Francisco.

We have the following galleries of screen shots from various films:

Even thirty years after, the 'persistence of the counterculture' is still readily evident:

  • The Photo Gallery for the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Human Be-In, though not strictly images of historical Digger events, nevertheless provides evidence of the persistence of the counter culture which the Diggers were instrumental in creating. These photos also add the dimension of color where many of the photos from 1966-67 are black/white.

A sampling of two photographers who were there:

  • The Gene Anthony gallery of Digger photos is a compilation of low-resolution images found on various web sites that this consummate photographer shot from the early stages of the Digger movement.
  • William Gedney was an East Coast photographer who received a Guggenheim fellowship to travel America and shoot images that caught his eye. He ended up in San Francisco within a few weeks of the startup of Free Food in the Panhandle in October, 1966. His work was mostly still in negative form, waiting for the processing of his posthumous collection some day, until recently. Check out the updated and vastly expanded set of galleries that depict the early history of the San Francisco Diggers. (Updated Sept 2022)

NBC Bay Area produced an hour-long documentary about the Summer of Love as part of the Revelations series. It aired twice in June, 2017.

  • One of the segments of the film highlighted the Diggers and featured an interview with Vicki Pollack who had joined the Diggers in early 1967 after arriving from New York. In this interview, Vicki presents an articulate description of the attraction that the Digger vision offered to young people who had been drawn to the Haight-Ashbury. Peter Coyote narrates the film and this segment.

Videos & Films

Starting with the project in 1980 to salvage Nowsreal (the film that the Diggers produced in 1968), the Digger Archives has collected the following films and videos that document the period, the people, and the events that constitute this historical narrative.

Videos (oldest to most recent)

Plea to Attic Pickers

If anyone has photographs or videos that they would like to donate to the Digger Archives, please contact the curator. This project is never done, it just moves toward a state of Furthur Completion. There will be a Miscellany gallery of photographs that have turned up over the years, not by any one photographer, but with images both iconic and mundane.

 

 
The Digger Archives is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Cite As: The Digger Archives (www.diggers.org) / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 / All other uses must receive permission. Contact: curator at diggers dot org.