26 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY november 23-29, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com A collection of portraits by David Cushing Fuess illuminates the lives of artists, spiritual teachers and old-timers on the Monterey Peninsula in the 1970s and ’80s. By Tajha Chappellet-Lanier Photos by David Cushing Fuess Future History Baba Hari Dass was an Indian yoga master. In 1952 he took a vow of silence, and from then on he communicated with the help of a small chalkboard. He taught yoga to Ram Dass, who would go on to write the influential 1971 book Be Here Now. Baba Hari Dass came to the United States in 1971 and inspired the creation of the Mount Madonna Center in the Santa Cruz Mountains, among other similar retreat centers. He died in 2018. “This is one of my absolute favorite photos,” David Fuess says. Wha Ja Kim was a pioneering acupuncturist with an office on Cass Street in Monterey. Fuess worked as her assistant, and the experience had a huge impact on his life. “If it weren’t for her I wouldn’t be an acupuncturist,” Fuess told the crowd during a 2013 exhibition of his portraits. Kim died in 2019. The first time David Cushing Fuess remembers seeing a photograph appear, slowly at first then all at once in a pool of developer, he was 10 years old. The experience captured his boyhood imagination, and laid the groundwork for a lifelong fascination with portrait photography. “I understood something visceral about photography early on,” Fuess says. “Those people are alive in the photographs for me. I’m there.” The people Fuess is referring to are mainly artists, spiritual teachers and healers of a range of modalities, both locals and visitors, who were captured by Fuess’ camera in the 1970s and ’80s at a time when the Monterey Peninsula felt like the center of a universe of discovery and creation. To look at these photos now is, in many cases, to peer back in time: to the early years of the Esalen Institute and its exploration of human potential; to what was perhaps a more Bohemian, artistic time in Carmel; to the animated faces of old-timers now gone but not forgotten. At the time, however, the photos were news—not breaking news, perhaps, but the kind of human interest stories that regularly fill pages of any local paper, connecting people to the place they live and the neighbors they live around by highlighting the stories of artists, business people, teachers, activists and others. Fuess arrived in Carmel in 1972, drawn by a desire to be close to the ocean, to nature and to his parents, who had moved here after his father John, a diplomat, retired. In 1975 he got a job at the Carmel Pine Cone—the pay was $2.50 an hour, he recalls— writing feature stories. It was a good deal for the paper, Fuess says now, because the Pine Cone got a writer and a photographer in one. This is how his collection of portraits began. “I was in bliss,” Fuess says of the job. “Basically I could call up anyone I wanted and say, ‘Let’s do a story.’” And call he did—artist Barbara Spring and writer/Henry Miller confidant Emil White and Esalen Institute cofounder Dick Price and architect Nathaniel Owings and more. Almost all the photos in Fuess’ collection were taken to accompany a newspaper article, and their compositions show traces of how and when the interview took place. Some photos seem to clearly express the personality of the sub-
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