These intimate color photos were taken by American photographer Harold Gee that show portraits of his young friends in San Diego from 1971 to 1975.
“Late Sixties, and I was timid about carrying a camera because there were a lot of folks that were suspicious of anyone carrying a camera...probably with good reason. It was a period of social upheaval, drugs that were fun but illegal, mass protests and political activism, and all this combined with police that used infiltration and snitches to bust people (and they also had cops with cameras).
But I started snapping a few photos of my friends, and as time went on people got sorta used to me having a camera. The general paranoia about cameras dissipated as the years went on.
These scans are from the negatives, which have been stored in a non-climate-controlled environment (mostly in hot & humid New Orleans) for approximately four decades. Most of them show some degree of degradation upon close inspection.”
