Lisa Law
The Music Photo Gallery · Represented Photographer
1964 – Present

Lisa Law

B. Photographer & Filmmaker · Chronicler of the 1960s Counterculture ·1964 – Present
Lisa Law
Portrait of the photographer
Biography

Lisa Law (b. Lisa Jo Bachelis, Los Angeles, 1943) is an American photographer and filmmaker whose camera became one of the definitive lenses on the 1960s counterculture. She began photographing Bay Area and Los Angeles musicians in 1964 while working for Frank Werber, manager of the Kingston Trio. Married to Tom Law, road manager for Peter, Paul and Mary, she lived at "the Castle" in Los Feliz, where she photographed Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, and the era's rising stars.

Over the next decade she documented the Human Be-In, the Monterey Pop Festival, Haight-Ashbury, anti-Vietnam War marches, the Diggers, and the commune movement before settling on farms in northern New Mexico. At Woodstock in 1969 she helped organize the free kitchen that fed roughly 130,000 people, photographing the festival alongside the Hog Farm collective. Her subjects ranged from Janis Joplin and the Beatles to homeless communities, the El Salvadoran resistance, and the Navajo and Hopi nations.

Because she photographed her friends and her own life rather than chasing assignments, her archive became an unusually intimate record of the era, work now held in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. She continues to live and work in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In the artist's
own words
The Sixties were a liberation, a liberation to do what you felt like doing. You believed in yourself, and you acted on it.
Lisa Law
Selected Works

From the archive.

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Bob Dylan, Los Angeles, California, 1966, photographed by Lisa Law.
Bob Dylan,  Los Angeles, CA, 1966
Lisa Law $0
Selected career exhibitions & projects

Career Exhibitions & Selected Projects

A selected record of museum and gallery presentations, publications, assignments and significant projects from Lisa Law's career.

Type
Title
Venue
Year
Museum
A Visual Journey: Photographs by Lisa Law, 1965–1971
Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.
1998–1999
Publications

Books

Monographs, catalogues and photography books from the archive.

Flashing on the Sixties: A Tribal Document

Flashing on the Sixties: A Tribal Document

Lisa Law
Squarebooks · 1987

Lisa Law's landmark photographic memoir of the 1960s counterculture — a tribal document of Woodstock, the communes, and the era's musicians and seekers, drawn from her own archive.

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Interviews with Icons: Flashing on the Sixties

Interviews with Icons: Flashing on the Sixties

Lisa Law
Lumen Books · 2000

Law's conversations with the figures who defined a generation, expanding the Flashing on the Sixties project with first-hand interviews and photographs.

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Institutional Collections

Permanent Collections

Selected museums and institutions whose permanent collections include work by Lisa Law.

  • Smithsonian Institution — National Museum of American HistoryPhotographic History Collection — more than 200 photographs by Lisa Law documenting the 1960s counterculture.
    Washington, D.C., USA
Moving image & archive

Films, Interviews
& Television

Documentaries, recorded interviews and television appearances from the archive.

Lisa Law on The Sixties and the Museum of the Sixties
Interview

Lisa Law on The Sixties and the Museum of the Sixties

Interview2021

Interview

LA Art Stream, interview with Lisa Law
Interview

LA Art Stream, interview with Lisa Law

Interview2011

For over five decades Lisa Law's still, movie & video images chronicle social & cultural changes in America, from her book & documentary Flashing on the Sixties to her moving images of indigenous people of North, South, & Central America as they struggle for sovereignty & survival

Selected Press

In the press.

PleaseKillMe

Lisa Law: Capturing the Sixties and Beyond With Her Truth-Telling Camera

A career-spanning interview on Law's truth-telling camera and her role documenting the 1960s from the inside.

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Smithsonian, National Museum of American History

A Visual Journey: Photographs by Lisa Law, 1965–1971

The museum's Photographic History Collection holds more than two hundred of Law's photographs spanning cultural, domestic, and social history.

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