Canada's freewheeling Sixties generation

Picture Perfect

The original teen spirit

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/books/the-original-teen-spirit/article1326093/

For our illustrated book of the week, a return to Canada's
freewheeling Sixties generation

Peter Scowen
Oct. 16, 2009

In 1970, a young and depressed Winnipeg photographer accepted an
assignment from the National Film Board of Canada to document the
country's youth culture. Gerry Kopelow hit the road armed with his
camera and film and spent the summer "stalking," as he puts it in the
introduction, the denizens of outdoor music festivals and downtown
protests from Winnipeg to Toronto.

The images Kopelow gather stayed on a shelf for 40 years, until he
took a chance and submitted them for exhibition to the art gallery at
the University of Winnipeg. They were accepted, so Kopelow, today a
successful commercial photographer, then approached University of
Manitoba Press to see if they might be suitable for publication.

The result is All Our Changes, a one-of-a-kind document about a brief
moment in this country's history that captures both the
self-indulgence of the hippie movement and its vital hope for a better world.

Most of the photos in the book revolve around Winnipeg's active music
scene and many festivals of that era ­ one which produced the Guess
Who, the Electric Jug and Blues Band, and the Fifth. It was an
incredible summer for music in Winnipeg, which saw Janis Joplin and
The Grateful come through the city as part of the Festival Express,
and Led Zeppelin and Iron Butterfly appear at Man-Pop, a concert
organized by the provincial government. (Kopelow lost the colour
slides he took of Led Zeppelin.)

There are also shots from the Mariposa Folk Festival on Toronto's
Centre Island that summer, including one of Joni Mitchell at the
height of her popularity.

And then there are unassuming and moving pictures of young Canadians
on the road; the hopeful, freewheeling children of the Sixties who
spent the summer hitchhiking across the county and crashing at the
homes of friends and strangers.

One of the best things about the book is the introductory
conversation between Kopelow and an interviewer, in which Kopelow
tells the moving story of how he discovered photography while growing
up in Winnipeg's immigrant-fed South End.

He discusses frankly the depression he suffered through his youth,
and how the gift of a camera from a teacher turned his life around.
His unhappiness turns out to be a blessing, in the sense that it gave
him a sense of being an outsider ­ essential for a photographer ­ and
seems also to have immunized him against the euphoric dogma of the
era he was paid to put on film.

"Stalking. That's what I did. I stalked situations," Kopelow says.

"My stalking involved discarding moments that seemed false to me,
that seemed pretentious, and looking for unguarded moments. I was
interested in faces in repose, not faces that were posed, but faces
that were in repose, because I felt they represented a more authentic
view of the interior."

He later adds: "Here was this particular bubble when a lot of people
did change. Nowadays, it's thought of by people who didn't experience
it as quaint, cute and silly, which it was. But there were aspects of
this era which were, I hesitate to use the word, noble, but were much
more authentic, much more profound, and worth looking at."

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