TAYLOR CAMP 1969 - 1977
by John Wehrheim
15 December 2009 -
16 January 2010
In 1969, Howard Taylor, brother of actress Elizabeth, bailed out a rag-tag band of thirteen young Mainlanders jailed on Kauai (island 90 miles northwest of Honolulu) for vagrancy and invited them to camp on his oceanfront land. Soon waves of hippies, surfers and troubled Vietnam vets found their way to Taylor Camp and built a clothing-optional, pot-friendly tree house village at the end of the road on the island’s North Shore. In 1977, after condemning the village to make way for a State park, government officials torched the camp — leaving little but ashes and memories of “the best days of our lives.” Powerfully evocative photos from the seventies reveal a community that rejected consumerism for the healing power of nature while the story of Taylor Camp’s seven-year existence is documented through interviews made thirty years later with the campers, their neighbors and the Kauai officials who finally got rid of them.
Published and exhibited here for the first time more than thirty years later, John Wehrheim’s powerful black-and-white photographs are a time capsule of the Woodstock Generation’s “back to the garden” dream. An important piece of American history beautifully captured on film.
Sent to Hawai‘i by the Sierra Club in 1969, John Wehrheim did a series of articles entitled “Paradise Lost” and then never went back to the mainland. He began photographing Taylor Camp in 1971; then in 1975, after two years living with both refugees and villagers in Asia, John began to seriously document this tree house community, seeing it as both a traditional village and refugee settlement — a “hippie” refugee camp next to a crystalline stream in a tropical forest along a beach in paradise. Photographer, writer and filmmaker, John lives on Kauai with his wife JoAnn Yukimura and their daughter Maile. His most recent film is also titled TAYLOR CAMP and published BHUTAN: HIDDEN LANDS OF HAPPINESS with Serindia Publications (2007).
