Hippie Chick: A Tale of Love, Devotion & Surrender is a fine art, hard cover coffee table photography book by famed rock and roll photographer Jay Blakesberg. Hippie Chick will be released October 1, 2015 via Rock Out Books and is available for pre-sale now at www.rockoutbooks.com.
Featuring 445 images curated from Blakesberg’s 35+ year career, Hippie Chick celebrates the unique connection between the vibrant community of free-spirited women who are inspired by, and help inspire, live music. Blakesberg’s visual anthropology beautifully captures the feminine festival and concert archetypes, and the individuals, who have graced the fields and performance halls of America since 1980. Earth mamas and fairy princesses, hula hoopers and whirling dervishes, front row regulars and flower crown makers; the entire tribe of dedicated, music-loving women – their fashion and their passion – is sensuously brought to life through Blakesberg’s artful lens.
Iconic rocker and pioneering hippie chick Grace Slick (Jefferson Airplane) provides the book’s Foreword, offering a retrospective of women in the original hippie-era music scene. Slick writes, “We chose to manifest our dreams rather than follow a pre-set norm. We chose to fly rather than crawl. We chose to experiment rather than walk through someone else’s flat world.”
In the book’s Afterword, modern-day hippie chick Grace Potter considers how women today carry on the legacy of the demographic. “We are not just the girls dancing in the front row at the concert. We are not just the wax figurine copies of our rebel ancestors,” Potter says. “We are the living, breathing manifestation of every path they blazed, every war they protested, every song they loved…” Potter, who was raised by artist parents in Vermont, fronts her own rock band that plays many of the recent festivals documented throughout Hippie Chick.
Hippie Chick’s 232 pages of photography are anchored by an Introduction and three short essays – titled “Love,” “Devotion,” and “Surrender” - each written by freelance journalist Edith Johnson. Johnson, who has documented her concert experiences through social media since 2012 as “Festival Girl,” left behind academia and a staid career in the art world to pursue her dream of documenting music full-time. On the road during the preparation of Hippie Chick, Johnson interviewed 81 different women from the live music scene. Their colorful anecdotes have been distilled into a series of quotes selected to accompany Blakesberg’s images, bringing further dimension to the book’s overarching theme of what it means to be a modern-day hippie chick.
“I have felt for a long time that what I was doing is visual anthropology,” explains Blakesberg. “I truly believe that this is a unique tribe whose story should be told. These women have blazed a powerful trail, from the early 1960s through today, and have forever changed the face of women in pop culture. I hope these photos and words illustrate the positive vibes that this scene continues to generate.”
Click here for a downloadable PDF http://blakesberg.com/temp/
