In 1971, two years after photographer, filmmaker and author John Wehrheim first came to Kauai, he moved into an A-frame shack behind Howard Taylor’s home in Haena.
He then began photographing nearby Taylor Camp, a small hippie treehouse, clothing-optional community also on Taylor’s property and founded, in 1969, by Taylor, the brother of actress Elizabeth Taylor.
Of that time Wehrheim wrote: “These hippies and surfers at Taylor Camp were living a simple, near-subsistence life and hanging their hopes on a better future, far from the ideological persecution they had suffered in Berkeley and other major cities where police brutality and anti-Vietnam War activism had transformed peaceful university campuses into violent conflict zones. They inspired me to photograph them with a documentarian’s lens until Taylor Camp’s destruction in 1977.”
In 2022, many years after the success of his Taylor Camp documentary film and hardcover photography book, Wehrheim was invited to show a collection of original Taylor Camp prints at the Stone Bell House Castle in Prague, Czech Republic.
He titled the show “Paradise Lost,” and was amazed by the reception of over 10,000 attendees, as Taylor Camp continued to captivate new audiences with its utopian story of radical idealism.
“Who would have thought, 50 years ago, as a fledgling photographer, that my pictures of Taylor Camp would take Eastern Europe by storm? I certainly didn’t,” said Wehrheim.
The Czech exhibit led to another “Paradise Lost” show in 2024 at the Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum in Bratislava, Slovakia, and once again, Wehrheim was astonished by an enthusiastic response.
In conversations with Slovakians, Wehrheim was impressed by their fascination with the Taylor Camp experiment in creating a gentler, more sustainable, new society.
“Fifty years have passed, but Taylor Camp continues to remind us that building a simpler, more compassionate world is still possible,” noted Wehrheim.
Also, a fascinating book of interest to myself and to others intrigued by Kauai’s history is Wehrheim’s “The Kauai Album,” a collection of pictures of historic Kauai architecture he photographed during 1975-76.
Many of the buildings no longer exist, since they were destroyed by Hurricane Iwa in 1982.
