During the 1960s, America’s counterculture was brewing: A new generation was seeking answers, determined to live differently than their post-World War II parents. The photographs in Irwin Klein and the New Settlers document the hippie movement into New Mexico from 1967 to 1971. Klein, who died in Brooklyn in 1974, called them the “new settlers,” saying that, like their predecessors, the Old West pioneers, these young people represented the “embodiment of a mythic American West where people could go to reinvent themselves.”
Klein’s stark black-and-white photos show the young men and women as he found them, from daily chores like chopping wood, to expressive portraits and communal celebrations. The photos gain historical depth from essays by scholars, describing this time of cultural upheaval, including the conflicts between the new settlers and the Hispanic, Native and other local residents impacted by the “hippie invasion.”
https://www.hcn.org/issues/48.17/see-these-photos-of-the-new-settlers
