PHOTO:The Family Acid
The Family Acid collective is responsible for some of the most visually intriguing and detailed documentation of the counter cultural movement of the ‘70’s on. Roger Steffens’ photographic work covers his career in the Vietnam war, as a writer, lecturer, editor and expert archivist of Bob Marley and the inner circles of Reggae music.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Benrubi Gallery Archive
The Family Acid, is an artistic collective centuring around the counterculture-era photography of Roger Steffens, and archived, digitized, and curated by Steffens’ daughter Kate, son Devon and wife, Mary. Roger Steffens is a renowned musicologist as well as an actor and narrator in both documentary and drama films: he’s published six books on Bob Marley, and appeared in or narrated Academy Award–winning films as “Forrest Gump”, “Wag the Dog” and “The Flight of the Gossamer Condor”. Roger Steffens began taking pictures while serving in the Psychological Operations Unit during the Vietnam War, and over the next two decades amassed an archive of 40,000 Kodachrome slides and hundreds of thousands of black and white and color negatives. He simply sought to record the world around him, true to his (often psychedelic) experience of it: “I was trying to see photographically the way I was seeing when I tripped”. There are approximately. In early 2015, The Family Acid released their first book. Influenced by the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson and the psychedelic investigations of Timothy Leary, Steffens’s photographs offer a refreshingly cool, ground-level perspective on the counterculture of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Inquisitive, empathic, often wry but never judgmental, Steffens’s work is diaristic, psychedelic, and documentary, impulses that would be discrete in another photographer’s work, yet are here merged into photographs that, in the words of his son Devon, “Imagine a different America, one of strange beauty and mystic truth”.
Info: Benrubi Gallery, 2nd Floor, 521 West 26th Street, New York, Duration: 7/7-26/8/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-17:00, http://benrubigallery.com
