Lensman of '60s

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

SAN FRANCISCO -- It was 1968, a year of assassinations, student unrest and growing protests against the war in Vietnam. David Fenton was just a kid with a camera, and his life was forever changed.

"I was a high school student in Manhattan and a pretty good photographer, so I started going around in the streets, photographing stuff," Mr. Fenton recalls. "I was an impressionable youngster, so I came under the influence. And all these wild, crazy people came to trust me."

Those "wild, crazy people" were totemic figures of the 1960s -- members of the Weather Underground and the Black Panther Party and the activists who came to be known as the Chicago Seven. In a newly released compilation, "Shots: An American Photographer's Journey 1967-1972," Mr. Fenton's photographs depict the protests, politics and personalities of that turbulent era with a keen eye for detail and a naive fearlessness that comes only with youth.

Today, Mr. Fenton is president of Fenton Communications, a top media firm for such liberal causes as MoveOn.org and Win Without War. Gray-haired and 53, he still exudes the mischievous spirit that led him to drop out of high school at 17 to chronicle a revolution.

"This is one of the Central Park be-ins, where a kid burned an American flag," Mr. Fenton says, peering through half-glasses at a stark image of a man fleeing two mounted police. "A cop chased him down and beat ... him. And I'm just a kid, taking pictures of it."

Mr. Fenton spent his teenage years in the crucible of '60s radicalism, armed with a press pass, two Leica M4 cameras and unparalleled access to major figures. His shots of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and antiwar activists Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden are at once intimate, unvarnished and whimsical; his youthful eye managed to capture their sense of political righteousness as well as their personality and humor.

In an interview, Mr. Hayden -- who was part of the Chicago Seven protesters arrested and tried for violent demonstrations outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention and is a longtime California lawmaker -- praised Mr. Fenton for having the foresight to commit the era to film, long before the Internet and 24-hour cable news exposed consumers to a constant flood of images.

"He was in the vanguard of the visual," Mr. Hayden says, "and what I like about his photos is that you know something is authentic here. It's a real photo by a real person trying to understand the world."

Starting as a photographer for his high school newspaper, Mr. Fenton snapped pictures for an underground paper, the New York Free Press, and then joined Liberation News Service, a wire service for underground papers nationwide.

It wasn't long before editors at popular mainstream publications such as the New York Times, Life and Newsweek took notice, and in time, Mr. Fenton's pictures began appearing on their pages. While Mr. Fenton's movement comrades derided such news outlets as "pig media," the paychecks helped him supplement the $25 a week LNS paid him.

"LNS was a collective, so we all made joint decisions. Impossible, right?" Mr. Fenton recalls, laughing. "But we had a great darkroom, and we mailed packets of articles and pictures to papers all over the country, sometimes with great impact."

Some of Mr. Fenton's photographs -- such as the memorable shot of New Jersey's Fort Dix Stockade, where troops heading to Vietnam passed through a doorway bearing the slogan, "Obedience to the Law Is Freedom" -- became iconic images.

Mr. Fenton flew between the movement's major hot spots, photographing the eruptions at People's Park in Berkeley, Calif., one day and the Weather Underground's so-called Days of Rage in Chicago the next. He describes the Days of Rage -- a violent 1969 rampage through the city's business district, where protesters smashed windows and cars -- as the scariest event he ever shot.

"I thought they were out of their minds," he recalls. "After they marched, they all had clubs with them, and at some point, they took the clubs out and started smashing everything in the Chicago Loop, and the police opened fire on them."

To be sure, Mr. Fenton's work wasn't always tinged with violence and anarchy. The book's chapter on music -- titled "What's That Sound?" -- features photographs of B.B. King, Janice Joplin and a host of other performers whose songs became the soundtrack of the era.

"That's John and Yoko with Jerry Rubin playing congas," Mr. Fenton says, gazing at a photograph of an earnest-looking John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

As the street protests of the '60s began to dry up, Mr. Fenton took the public relations skills he credits Mr. Hoffman for teaching him and created his own communications company.

"Abbie was one of the funniest people I ever met, and one of the smartest," Mr. Fenton says, pointing to a photograph of a curly-haired Mr. Hoffman, jaw set, arm raised. "He was way ahead of his time in understanding the impact of television on our politics. He just figured out you needed to do something creative to get the TV cameras."