Roger Steffens has led a life that might seem almost unbelievable if he hadn’t captured it all on film. An actor, poet, broadcaster and writer, he is regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on Bob Marley and the Wailers. Six rooms of his house in Los Angeles are given over to his collection of reggae music and cultural ephemera. It was Steffens who first tipped Paul Simon towards African music, leading to the recording of Graceland. He has also worked with Keith Richards to compile an album of Nyabinghi music recorded in the living room of Richards’s Jamaican home. Prior to all that though, Steffens worked in an army psychological operations unit in Vietnam, after being drafted during the war. He was told to photograph his assignments, beginning a 50-year relationship with the camera that resulted in an extraordinary archive of images that trace his life and times – and document a pivotal period in American history, beginning in the mid-60s, when the United States first started to question itself, and young people began to “drop out” and raise families on the fringes on society. Steffens was one of those people.
Many of his photos are an evocation of a freewheeling hippie lifestyle: camping in Marrakech in the early 70s, trekking in the redwood forest of northern California, visiting Stonehenge when you could still wander among the stones, and attending music festivals where the North Vietnamese flag was proudly flown. There are also stunning psychedelic double exposures of landscapes in Big Sur and beyond.
It took Steffens’s children, Devon and Kate, to realise that these were more than just their hippy parents’ family snaps. They set up an Instagram account for their father and started posting two pictures a day from his archive, leading to a book deal with Los Angeles art book publisher, SUN Editions, which has just brought out the first collection of Steffens’s work, The Family Acid. Now in his early 70s, Steffens finds himself enjoying a second life as an acclaimed photographer.
When asked if there’s a thread that runs through his photographs, Steffens fires back a single word: counterculture. “People who don’t live normal, straight, nine-to-five lives,” he explains, “who have abandoned the ‘crapitalist shitstem’ as Peter Tosh called it – artists, freaks.”
Steffens was given his first hit of LSD in 1966 by his friend, poet Bob Watt. At the time, he says, he’d “never even smoked a joint … I was a very straight Irish Catholic kid, born in Brooklyn, raised in Jersey. I was the New Jersey state oratory champion when I was a senior in high school. My dad managed the Remington Rand typewriter office on Madison Avenue in New York City. My mother was a housewife.” Psychedelics “changed everything”, and the idea of “alternative living” seemed an imperative rather than a luxury. Two years later, that dream was interrupted when, at age 25, Steffens got drafted into the army’s psychological operations unit in Vietnam.
In truth, Steffens doesn’t really seem like a psyops kind of guy. Despite his stentorian radio announcer baritone, he’s clearly a gentle soul, who signs off conversations reggae-style with “One Love”. After arriving in Saigon, he faced the prospect of lugging a loudspeaker on his back through combat zones blasting surrender messages to the Viet Cong, but received a lucky break when an officer, noticing his IQ and typing speed, gave him a cushy gig in air-conditioned digs as the colonel’s typist. He then, inadvertently, managed to subvert the system from inside.
After writing an impassioned letter to a local paper back in Racine, Wisconsin, requesting aid packages for families he saw living in sewer pipes in Saigon, he received “10,000 pounds of packages on two five-ton trucks” addressed to him in Saigon and a ton of publicity for his good deeds. His commanding officer gave him his own division within the psyops unit, working on “civic action” projects, instructing him to work on whatever he liked – the only proviso being he was to photograph everything. He did just that, shooting over 20,000 frames during his 26-month tour.
Back home, Steffens floated around northern California during the early 70s and began to compulsively photograph his daily life and that of his friends: John Steinbeck IV (son of the Grapes of Wrath writer) and Sean Flynn (son of Errol) – both of whom had reported from Vietnam for Dispatch News Service; war reporter Richard Boyle (the co-writer and subject of Oliver Stone’s 1986 film, Salvador), British war photographer Tim Page and Ron Kovic, the paraplegic anti-war activist, whose memoir, Born on the Fourth of July, was adapted into another Oliver Stone film starring Tom Cruise.
Page, who roomed with Steffens in Berkeley, schooled him in photography. Kovic inadvertently provided him with his signature shot – double exposures – after leaving a roll of previously exposed film, featuring snaps of Cambodian refugees, in Steffens’s camera bag. Mistaking it for a fresh roll, Steffens reshot it with photos of stained glass windows in an antebellum mansion on the Ohio river, only realising what had happened when the film was developed and he saw the double images. “I go, wow, that’s beautiful. I wonder if I could figure out how to do this on purpose?”
Steffens’s photos document the strange new world he found himself in after “dropping out”, recreating the altered states of consciousness that became a way of life for him and his friends. But, as son Devon writes in the afterword to the book, although his father “always had a camera in his hand”, his children never thought of him as a photographer. For years, their father’s Kodachrome slides were just an everyday part of family life, brought out for slideshows during which Steffens would tell entertaining stories. Then two years ago, Steffens decided to employ Devon to scan all 40,000 slides – an undertaking that took an entire year – and Kate started posting them online, “mostly for family and friends, for our personal history”.
She put them up under the name The Family Acid, a reference to the fact that her parents – Roger and his wife, Mary – first met while tripping during a hippy fair in Mendocino, northern California. “A lot of people have called us various iterations of the ‘blank’ on acid, like ‘the Waltons on acid’,” says Kate. “They’ll say, you guys are like a normal family but on acid – that kind of thing, so it stuck.”
His newfound acclaim in the digital world excites Steffens, who doesn’t even own a mobile phone. “How about some of the ‘followers’ we have?” he says to his daughter. “The former editor-in-chief of Life magazine. The costume designer for Mad Men.”
“Dad, I wouldn’t brag about that stuff,” Kate admonishes him. “Keith Richards has been to our house. At that point, nothing else is really very cool.”
• The Family Acid is published by SUN Editions; thefamilyacid.com
