Collection: Lisa Law

Lisa's career as a photographer began in the early sixties. With a new Honeywell Pentax camera in hand and working as an assistant to a manager in the rock and roll scene she began taking pictures. Whether she was backstage with The Beatles, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Kingston Trio, Otis Redding, The Lovin Spoonful, The Velvet Underground, The Byrds, taking promotional photographs of Janis Joplin and Big Brother, or at home making dinner for house guests like Bob Dylan or Andy Warhol or helping feed hundreds of thousands at Woodstock with the Hog Farm Commune, her passion for photography grew into a profession as she sported her new Nikon F.

In the mid-Sixties she lived with the Mushroom people of Huautla, Oaxaca, Mexico, capturing the essence of this endangered culture. Moving to San Francisco in 1967, she chronicled the life of the flower children in Haight Ashbury. She carried her camera wherever she went, to the Human Be-In and the anti-Vietnam march in San Francisco, Monterey Pop Festival, and meetings of the Diggers. She then joined those who migrated to the communes of New Mexico in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Wavy Gravy, and Ram Dass use her photographs consistently today.

Since that time, Lisa has specialized in documenting history as she has experienced it. As a mother, writer, photographer and social activist, her work reveals distinctive communities of people, including homeless of San Francisco, the El Salvadorians resistance against military oppression, and the Navajo and Hopi nations struggling to preserve their ancestral religious sites, traditions and land. She uses her camera as a powerful instrument to champion the rights of indigenous nations, bringing to a wide audience riveting insights into their cultures just as she did during the social revolution of the Sixties. As a photographer/documentarian, Lisa's perspective is rare and unique. From the reservations of Arizona and New Mexico to the Mansions of Beverly Hills she is welcomed as a friend and participant thus allowing her images to reflect a sense intimacy and spontaneity that is rarely seen by outsiders.

Over the past four decades her still, movie and video images have chronicled the social and cultural changes in America, from her film documentary, Flashing On The Sixties, to her moving contemporary still photographs of the indigenous people of North, South, and Central America as they struggle for sovereignty and survival. Lisa's book, of the same title, is a unique pictorial record of the Sixties, reflecting Lisa's indefatigable search for memorable human images.