Surreal Halloween portraits from 1970s San Francisco

Unhinged and otherworldly portraits of All Hallows Eve almost half a century ago form the basis of photographer Ken Werner’s new book ‘Halloween: A Fantasy in Three Acts’.

Exactly 48 years ago today, on October 31, 1976, Ken Werner travelled to Polk Street in San Francisco’s Downtown area, camera in tow. He had moved to the city from New York’s Lower East Side a few months before. His friend – aware of Werner’s eye for a picture – had told him he’d find “something he might like” Downtown, which at the time was San Francisco’s de-facto LGBTQ+ centre.

As he arrived, he found around 70,000 people partying, dancing and dramatically interacting with one another in the streets. Around half of the people present were dressed up in wild, finely detailed costumes, ranging from double-headed monsters to NSFW, kink embracing setups. “I was amazed, I had never seen anything like this before – the creativity, the art of what they were doing,” Werner recalls. “This was not a parade. This was street theatre.”

After spending the rest of the evening taking portraits of its surreal characters and atmosphere, Werner would return to Polk Street each Halloween, then to Castro when the street parties migrated there in 1979. In 1981, he self-published a limited run of his photobook Halloween: A Fantasy in Three Acts, laying out some of his most arresting black and white images from the past half decade’s festivities. Now, over four decades later, the book is set to be republished by Anthology Editions, drum scanning the original prints to bring a wild time in the city’s history back to life.

In the mid-70s, San Francisco was a vastly different city to the one that exists now. Long before the dot-com bubble and takeover from Silicon Valley tech workers, it had cheap rents, a sizeable LGBTQ+ community and an anti-establishment edge borne out of the Summer of Love. “The source of it all was the people of San Francisco, and in large measure, but not entirely, the gay community,” Werner says. “There was a saying at the time that the North American continent was tilted, and all the loose marbles had rolled into San Francisco. To a certain extent, it was true – it was a place where people on the fringes could live, there were a lot of very creative people and it all erupted on Halloween.”

Unlike other Halloween parade celebrations across the USA and beyond, the Polk Street and Castro parties were never centrally co-ordinated or planned by a specific group. “The amazing thing was that it wasn’t really organised,” says Werner. “It was considered a gay celebration, but it wasn’t entirely that – San Francisco was very open and playful, but it wasn’t demarcated as you might think now – it was a community thing focused in the gay areas.”

Werner’s pictures provide a glimpse into the wild self-expression on show. Creating a surrealist, dreamlike visual narrative across its spreads, the book is laid out into three sections, loosely fitting the chronology of a single imagined evening. “It was eight nights of photography, which I structured into a paper movie – a synthesised night,” he explains. “It starts off at dusk, proceeds to get erotic, then later gets tired and even dangerous. I wanted to evoke what it was like on a particular night.”

Despite their anarchic magic, the Halloween street parties would often hold an edge, even if dangers were most likely to come from external forces. Violent homophobic assaults were not uncommon, while in 1977 a gay man was murdered in his apartment. It led to lobbying for the party’s closure from sections of the authorities, and that looming threat led to Werner publishing the book in the first place.

“The person leading the opposition and who was really distorting the events of the night was named Dan White. You’re familiar with the type – very white, very conservative and out to score points,” Werner says. “He and the Board of Supervisors were attempting to shut it down. The thing about Dan White, is that a few years later he walked into the Mayor’s office and killed him, and then walked into Harvey Milk’s office and killed him.”

Ultimately, despite persistent attempts to curtail them the street parties continued until 2006 when a shooter opened fire into the crowd, and the city’s authorities put an end to a Halloween celebration like no other in the world.

With his book and its republishing, Werner’s pictures immortalise a golden, freer era for the city’s nightlife and LGBTQ+ community. In 1981, months after Halloween: A Fantasy in Three Acts was initially printed, the very first mention of AIDS in American newspapers was published. “There were amazing things happening in the 80s and 90s and that’s testament to the community, even though everyone was suffering in relation to AIDS,” he says. “They kept this as a sacred holiday, where you did what you wanted and you were playful, creative and erotic.”