Across the Great Divide: A Photo Chronicle of the Counterculture

In 1969 Roberta Price came west with her camera to see for herself what was going on in the communes that had begun to spring up in New Mexico and Colorado. Over the next nine years she took more than three thousand photos of commune life, and now she has selected the most revealing of these images for publication in a visual memoir that reflects on her experiences and invites us to contemplate the rural counterculture of her youth.

Unlike most photographers of the day, Price joined Libre, one of the Colorado communes, and lived there for seven years. Her photo documentation of her years at Libre provides a unique view of commune life through the eyes of a participant. We see the residents building homes, raising families, and celebrating community.

Roberta Price's many photographs of Drop City, New Buffalo, Reality Construction Company, Libre, and other southwestern communes capture long-haired men, women in self-made peasant attire, psychedelic art, sheaves of marijuana, cast-iron stoves, and preindustrial agricultural practices visual evidence of the great divide that separated Price, her friends, and associates from the families and neighbors among whom they had grown up. The photos also reveal the presence of record players, amplifiers, and electric guitars, along with a staggering array of architectural and interior design, and visits by such iconoclasts as Ken Kesey, Peter Orlovsky, and Allen Ginsberg.