What does it mean to be a hippie in the age of Obama? Photographer Steve Schapiro is one of the people best positioned to answer that question. In the 1960s, he documented the Haight-Ashbury scene, and a few years ago got to wondering where that kind of thing was happening in our own time. So from 2012 to 2014, Steve Schapiro traveled throughout America with his son Theophilus Donoghue, visiting “free-spirit movement” festivals like Burning Man, Shasta Festival, and Rainbow Gathering in California.

Some call the people who attend these events “bliss ninnies.” Learning that there was an actual term in use called “bliss ninnies” totally made my day.

The result of this journey was Bliss: Transformational Festivals and the Neo-Hippie, which was publishd by powerHouse Books last year.

According to Schapiro, these “neo-hippies” are less into drugs than their 1960s forebears and more into meditation and organic food. And also, judging from Schapiro’s photographs, they are into group hugs, with or mostly without clothing.
  

  
On the “neo-hippie” movement, Schapiro says,
 

I photographed Haight-Ashbury in 1967 and it was the center of the hippie movement. My son and I photographed between 2011 and 2012 a lot of music festivals and situations like that and we photographed the spirit of a whole new generation who are not as much into drugs but into meditation and are conscious of organic food and good eating. Today there are these music festivals and there are people who just go from one to another and it is, in a sense, their religion. I met this one man who said I am not a Catholic, not a Baptist, I am a festivaltarian. What he meant was that, spirituality, he got an inner sense of a spiritual high. The books is really about the joy people have.

 
Interestingly, everyone’s obviously talking about, reminiscing, remembering David Bowie this week, and while I was researching this seemingly unrelated post, it emerged that Schapiro has a pretty close connection to Bowie. Probably the DM post I’m most proud of that I wrote last year was this baby about a mysterious manuscript Bowie gave Cameron Crowe in the mid-1970s, which I stumbled upon in an archive last spring. The lead photo for that post was the Rolling Stone cover from February 1976 with Bowie’s picture on it. Steve Schapiro took that photograph.

Schapiro also took the photo for the cover of my favorite Bowie album, Station to Station. He has a book coming out next year called Bowie but it’s only available on Amazon UK. If you want a quicker fix, I recommend Then and Now, which came out in 2012.

Without further ado, here are some outstanding pictures from Bliss. Click on any image for a better view.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
via Hyperallergic
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
San Francisco group proposes 300-mile, $7.3B wall to keep Burning Man attendees from returning