In 1967, Elaine Mayes was living in a Haight-Ashbury commune and piecing together work as a photojournalist. With national media swarming the neighborhood, she saw firsthand, at 30, just how carelessly the press represented and, in a way, created the chaos of the Haight. “I wanted to make something that I thought might be more truthful and accurate about the situation,” she says. So in ’67 and ’68, in the months before she left San Francisco to take a teaching position at the University of Minnesota, she approached people on the street and in Golden Gate Park, asking if they’d like to have their portraits taken. Not one of them said no.

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