The Last Picture Show - Baron Wolman

It would be difficult to find a luckier man than Baron Wolman: as young photographer he moved with his wife to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco just before hippiedom was born, he decided to photograph an outdoor festival in New York that turned out to be Woodstock, and he had a casual conversation with a young man who wanted to start his own music magazine that turned into a job offer. At Rolling Stone.

Forty years have now passed since Wolman's on-site reporting at Woodstock, plenty of time for the importance of that weekend of noisy outdoor recreation to be inflated, deflated, and inflated once more. But whether or not you think Woodstock changed the world, Wolman's images of free love in the fields stand today as echoes from the booming youth of a generation that has grown 40 years older, but no less passionate.

From the looks of it, many have also purchased real estate in Malibu, where Wolman was on-hand to present and sign some of his best-known rock photos at the just-opened Malibu Lumber Yard high-end shopping center last week. This turned out to be another lucky night, first for the leather-jacket-clad boomers and their boomer-ette wives, who watched a slideshow of black-and-white photos and a short history presentation with the photographer, and second for the Lumber Yard itself, which has been waiting for an event like this to establish itself as a Malibu destination.

The photographer’s concert photos are one thing, but it's his images of the era that are truly striking: A line of suburban cars on Haight St. in San Francisco, filled with tourists waiting to see and touch the latest attraction, hippies. A fence at Woodstock torn down by freeloaders. Wolman was there, the right place at the right time.

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine at: http://www.lamag.com/do/blog.aspx?dt=08/18/2009