Almost utopia: the residents and radicals of Pikes Falls, Vermont 1950
In the summer of 1950, Rebecca Lepkoff and her husband Gene bought land in Jamaica, Vermont, a small, south-central Green Mountain town on the West River. A 34-year-old photographer, Rebecca had already made a name for herself as a member of the Photo League, which viewed photography as a tool for social change. Her photographs of her native Lower East Side in the 1930s and ‘40s were already becoming renowned. The Lepkoffs were drawn to the communitarian homesteaders who populated the Pikes Falls area of Jamaica, clustered near Scott and Helen Nearing. Published here for the first time are some 60 photographs that Rebecca Lepkoff took of natives and transplants at work and play during that summer of 1950, as the Korean War engulfed the nation’s headlines. These intimate images are the work of an artist at the peak of her craft and they portray a rural Vermont town at a moment in time just before paved roads and postwar development would alter its character forever.