Modern Merry Pranksters

"Whacky Packet" 

© Julie Pavlowski Green

 I began to read Tom Wolfe's book "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" on one overcast Saturday morning on a small excursion my friends and I had planned to take the night before. It was about 1/2 hour into the ride down Highway 1 that I cracked the book open as we wound our way south. We decided after driving around for a few hours that we should stop for lunch. We took the next exit. It lead us to the sleepy little town of La Honda.  A town none of us had visited before.

We ended up eating our sandwiches at a local park which had an unusual fire pit with horseshoes embedded on the rim and a strange little log cabin on the property. Suddenly, I felt the googly-eyed paper glasses in my pocket which I had absentmindedly placed in my pocket on the way out the door. With camera in hand, I decided to persuade my friends to let me photograph them wearing the glasses.

              

    "La Honda Gardens"

 © Julie Pavlowski Green

As soon as the glasses were on, my friends lost all their inhabitions. They became completely wild and different characters! Their fear of being photographed slipped away and being set loose, they became more engaging and theatrical in front of my lens. I wanted to see if this would work on other people I knew. I wanted to see more...

I began to create this series, which I have over the years loosely referred to as the
La Honda series, with abandon. My subjects now contained the personalities I longed to photograph. My own personal band of Modern Merry Pranksters...

     "Smoking Soul"  

© Julie Pavlowski Green

It was about the same time I started this series that I began questioning and indeed exploring ways of taking my photographs from two dimensional flat images, to three dimensional objects. I decide to rephotograph the 11x14 black and white portraits with a 4x5 copy camera. The larger size of the print allowed objects I bordered the images with to be at a pleasing proportion.

You must understand, this was years before digital photography and all manipulations I made were the old fashioned way - by hand. By rephotographing them, I took the photographic "sculptures" back into the two dimensional plane but I do think they sufficiently explored the idea that the photograph lacked space a three dimensional object contained.

                                                                      "Circus Girl"
                                                        © Julie Pavlowski Green
                                       

I used clay, and marbled paper; chilies and saffron; Mad Magazine stickers and colored filters; cochina dolls and wallpaper; shells, seeds and anise; old glamour magazines and animal crackers. I colored some of the black and white photographs by hand with photo oils and some I masked out so I could them process the background in sepia tone.

"Hot Mama"

© Julie Pavlowski Green

The images and personalities of those who were photographed wearing the googly-eyed glasses dictated to me what they should be surrounded by. I was attempting to convey the inner qualities of these people I knew very well and create a three dimensional border out of it.

                                                                 "Glamorous Curves"
                                                             © Julie Pavlowski Green


As my friends and I returned home later that day from our excursion to La Honda, I   picked up the book and began reading it where I had left off. And then his words jumped out of the page like a pop-up book. Tom started describing the exact location we had just had our lunch. The log cabin, the cement fire pit with embedded horse shoes... all were apart of the compound The Merry Pranksters used to live at.

Had the acid seeped into our skin? Were we really affected by our seemingly harmless excursion? Or was it kismet?

I like to think so.

                                                            "Portrait of my Father"
                                                          © Julie Pavlowski Green



Julie Pavlowski Green
February 16, 2013




Books to read if you  haven't already:

"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test"

by Tom Wolfe

and

"Sometimes A Great Notion"

by Ken Kesey