Bev Grant's Radical Archive
During the ’60s and '70s, Bev Grant found herself embedded in a series of revolutionary causes: from anti-war protests to the women’s liberation movement. Armed with her trusty camera, she documented the entire era, resulting in a far-reaching archive of radical history.
Text and photography: Bev Grant
THROUGHOUT MY CHILDHOOD, there was always a bit of an edge regarding how we were going to get by. I was raised Jewish in Portland, Oregon, and we were considered the black sheep of my dad’s family because my mom was not. At school, I became conscious of the class difference between me and other kids – mostly in terms of the clothing I could afford.
My dad gave me a guitar when I was 10 years old and I started taking lessons along with my two older sisters. He became our manager, and we performed around town as The Miller Sisters until I started high school. It was there I got a boyfriend, who was a jazz musician. We performed in shows together, but I began feeling less confident in my music. When we graduated, we got an apartment across town and both attended college, until eventually I dropped out. I wore my hair in a beehive, wore white lipstick, and we drove around town on a Vespa.
After a year, we moved to San Francisco against my father’s wishes. After an unhappy year, I told my boyfriend, “Let’s get married or forget about it.” So we did, and then moved to New York, where I got a job and he played music. After a couple of years, I left him and started living with another musician – who said he would “make a woman out of me”. That didn’t quite work out, but he did buy me a camera: a twin-lens reflex. After a couple of years, I left him too and found myself living alone for the first time.
My next-door neighbour at the time was Colombian. He was politically aware; a poet and an intellectual. We became friends, then lovers, and we talked about what was going on in the world. He had a camera, and we started taking photos together and going to anti-war demonstrations. I traded my rather bulky camera for a Pentax single-lens reflex, and began learning my craft – mostly through trial and error.
In 1967, I attended a workshop on women’s liberation. It was a mind-blowing experience for me. It put my life in a social context and helped me see that I actually had choices to determine my own destiny. I joined a consciousness-raising group, where we shared our experiences with adolescence, menstruation, birth control… We found the commonality in our stories and began understanding the roots of our oppression as women.
As well as being part o
