San Franciscos Psychedelic Sixties A Photographic Trip with Kelly Hart

Kelly Hart turned seventeen in 1960 and still had two years of high school to go, but he had already been bitten by the photo bug and had his own darkroom set up in a closet at home. Soon after graduating high school he moved to Berkeley, California, and was thrilled to witness this multi-racial and diverse reality, and became an avid visual documentarian. Kelly worked as a free-lance photographer, taking production stills for the UC Drama Department and publicity photos for the Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Some of these shots eventually appeared on album covers. Later, Kelly studied photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. He also had a part-time job at the Berkeley Art Center hanging the art exhibits and creating show announcements. He began to experiment with the dimension of time as it can be expressed in still photography through the use of long exposures that allow some motion of the subjects to be recorded as a blur. He went to public events where lighting might produce dramatic effects during such time exposures. He took a whole series of color slides of a theatrical happening that involved nude dancers with colored imagery projected on their bodies and eventually, in March 1966, Playboy Magazine published an article accompanied by four pages of his color photography. He experimented with both documentary film and animation and helped create a film called "Nowsreal" that was about the San Francisco Diggers. He invented a unique way of creating animation by drawing on hot glass with colored grease pencils and manipulating the pigment while it was in a fluid state, creating films that look like oil paintings in motion. He eventually got a U.S. patent on this process and an apparatus to utilize it. He made an animated sequence for a feature film called "The Naked Ape", released by Universal Studios that shows the evolution of man starting from a single cell. These experiences launched a decades-long career in film and video production. Readers interested in seeing some of Kelly's more recent photography can do so at www.flickr.com/photos/kellyhart and you can find out more about his life by reading a slightly fictionalized autobiography called "Which Hobbit Lives Here? Reflections on Society and Sustainability" available at www.which-hobbit.com. Kelly is now primarily involved with managing his websites, which include www.greenhomebuilding.com, www.earthbagbuilding.com and www.dreamgreenhomes.com.