Thousands of hippies from across the country converged on San Francisco during the Summer of Love in 1967. Many were college students on summer break who left come autumn; others stayed to witness the Haight’s gradual decay into a cultural wasteland.
Photographer James Marshall was one of those young people. He was attracted to the city’s Haight-Ashbury district by the explosion of culture – in music and fashion, in politics and mind-expanding drugs. Marshall was there to work, not like the hordes of flower children who washed up in the summer’s bohemian enclave. He was employed by the biggest record labels in the business to create a visual record of what Hunter S. Thompson called “the crest of a high and beautiful wave.”
