The Great Painted Cave

Between 1967 and 1974, photographer Bud Lee worked on assignment for Esquire, Life, Rolling Stone, and other leading publications. More often than not, he pitched his own stories--going places others would not, gaining unguarded access to elusive subjects, and shooting sublime, adventurous photography. Lee frequently found himself at the center of some of the biggest stories of his time: the aftermath of the 1967 Newark Riots, which turned the city streets into a war zone; Bobby Kennedy's funeral; Tricia Nixon's wedding; Martin Luther King Jr.'s April 1967 march to the UN, and his funeral almost a year later. He was an intrepid documentarian, an outsider who got insider access: in Andy Warhol's Factory; on the set of Fellini's Satyricon; among members of the avant-garde pansexual performance troupe the Cockettes at their Haight-Ashbury commune, Kaliflower; with a coven of acid-fried witches and occultist freaks in post-Manson Los Angeles; and at the Grand Ole Opry--surrounded by the bejeweled Nudie suit-wearing kings and queens of country. A self-taught photographer with fine art training at New York's National Academy and an idiosyncratic eye unconstrained by the conventions of documentary photography, Lee's work is poetic and painterly, occasionally profane, droll and irreverent. His extraordinary compositions bucked the prevailing styles of his photojournalist peers, and his lush palette rendered the newsmakers of the day and the uncanny American underground alike in glorious color. The Great Painted Cave is the first-ever collection of Bud Lee's photographs: a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria of American popular culture and beyond, from the Summer of Love to the impeachment of Nixon.