In 1970, a Fashion Photographer Accidentally Captured Aspen's Weirdest Era
In the final months of her career, photographer Toni Frissell documented a dance floor that represented Aspen-as-utopia.
Some people describe 1970s Aspen as just a humble li’l ski bum town. Note that the population on any given ski slope — true then, true now — averages 20 percent bums, 80 percent people of means.
Nothing like “Billionare Mountain” existed in the ‘70s. But Aspen’s always been about wealth. Founded in 1879 as Ute City (after the Ute People) during Colorado’s silver boom, it became Aspen (after the trees) in 1880. In 1894, a 2,058-pound, 93-percent pure silver nugget was extracted from the mine on Smuggler Mountain. The population swelled to 15,000.
One of those new townies: New Yorker Jerome Wheeler, president of Macy’s department stores, who visited Colorado in 1883 and fell in love with the mountains.
He also fell in love with the business opportunties, buying up silver mines and building the Hotel Jerome and Wheeler Opera House. At the Wheeler’s opening night in the spring of 1899 “satin programs were scented with rose water, and the [theater] glowed with some of the region’s first electric lights,” the Wheeler’s website says. “Conreid Opera Company performed ‘The King's Fool,’ followed by a squad of female fences in a swordplay exhibition.”
Aspen’s pretty much always been Aspen.
The financial panic of 1893 crashed the silver market, and for a spell, it grew a bit more rugged. By 1930, its population shrank to 704 residents who stayed because they really did love the mountains, rather than what they could extract from the mountains.
Those 704 people liked Aspen the way it was. But in the late ‘40s, Aspen’s fortunes rebounded — much to their dismay — due to the efforts of another another tycoon. Walter Paepke, president of Chicago’s Container Corporation of America, the country’s leading cardboard box manufacturer, moved to town.
He came at the behest of his wife, Elizabeth, “shortly after the end of World War II,” and then “embarked on a mission to remake the community into an American Salzburg… the city of culture and music in the Austrian Alps.” He installed a ski lift on Aspen Mountain, renovated the Wheeler Opera House, bought up huge chunks of real estate and generally commenced to art-direct Aspen in a Wes Anderson way.
“One of the more well-known incidents pointing up the friction between Walter Paepcke and the towns’ citizenry was when Paepcke, who had acquired an interest in a local hardware store, offered in 1946 to give paint to anyone who wanted to use it to spruce up their weathered homes,” the Aspen Times wrote in 2006. “The only catch was that the homeowner would have to follow a color scheme laid out by Bauhaus architect Herbert Bayer, who had come to Aspen at Paepckes’ invitation.”
In 1970, when photographer Antoinette “Toni” Frissell caught these free-form, clubby shots with her camera — a series dubbed “Dance and Fashion in Aspen, Colorado” — the town was in the midst of another round of cultural upheaval, again between the business class and more freewheeling sorts.
One month before Frissell stepped into an Aspen disco with her camera, Rolling Stone published Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Battle of Aspen,” promoted on the front cover as a blowout expose on “Freak Power in the Rockies.” The story centered on the campaign of 29-year-old “head, lawyer and bike-racer” Joe Edwards, who ran against pro-business candidates Eve Hohmeyer and heir to the mayoral throne Lenny Oates, the chosen successor to the retiring Dr. Robert “Buggsy” Barnard.
“Instead of describing locals as ‘free spirited’ like other magazine articles had done, this one said Aspen was full of ‘… freaks, heads, funhogs and weird night-people of every description,’” the Aspen Daily News wrote in 2020 in its 50-year anniversary look back at the campaign.
Edwards lost to Hohmeyer by six votes, and of course not long after that, Thompson ran for sheriff under the same “Freak Power” banner. (For a deeper dive into that campaign, check out the 2020 documentary Freak Power, which “tells the story of Hunter’s plan to become Sheriff, take control of Aspen and transform it from a conservative mining town into a mecca for artists, rebels and activists.”)
Bob Krueger, a longtime Aspenite who contributed photos to Thompson’s Rolling Stone piece, told the News that “The old-timers, chamber and ski company didn’t think much of the article, but the newer people to town, who hung out at the Pub, Chart House and later the Hotel Jerome, had a different opinion. The two groups didn’t much associate with each other.”
That dance floor, though — sure looks like the smart set and the freak set are a-minglin’ to me. And Toni Frissell was the perfect person to capture that mix, because she contained multitudes.
Toni Frissell, Complicated Person
Born into New York high society in 1907, Frissell was the youngest kid in her family, and the only girl. She emulated her sporty, risk-taking brothers, including her favorite sibling, filmmaker Varick Frissell. He taught her the basics: how to use all those sliding levers and lenses on her camera, how to frame a shot, how to find the light, how to capture a striking image. She also worked with Edward Steichen and apprenticed under Cecil Beaton while working for VOGUE. She shot for Harper’s Bazaar (they sent her to cover Jackie and Jack Kennedy’s wedding) and was the first woman staff photographer for Sports Illustrated.
She became a photographer by taking pictures — at first, just friends in her fancy social circle — but kept “pushing the enevelope” (that phrase often came up when people spoke of her), and eventually built a career taking photos not just of the world’s most beautiful people, but world figures, historical events and everyday people walking down the sidewalks of cities all over the world.
Her best-known work mixes fashion and the outdoors. She never shot in a studio, but took her models into meadows, deserts and oceans; her story-driven, site-specific shots revolutionized fashion photography. That was Frissell using her weakness as a strength — she freely admitted she had no idea how to shoot in a studio.
“Miss Frissell's underwater photographs were striking, to some conjuring up images of the model as anything from a mermaid to a corpse,” wrote the New York Times in 1996, when it reviewed her postumously published coffee table book, Toni Frissell: Photographs 1933 to 1967.
It was Jackie Onassis’s last book-editing project, completed with help from Frissell’s daughter, Sidney Stafford. “She loved movement and unusual angles, and she had a whimsical imagination,” Stafford said. “She always kept her eyes open for new ways to photograph."
George Plimpton wrote in his preface that “she was aggressive about getting a shot right. She once entered the orangutan cage at the Bronx Zoo to shoot from the ape's point of view and on another assignment lay down at the end of a runway to photograph a Flying Fortress, catching the angle of the belly of the B-17 as it took off.” She once quipped that “if it were in the way I'd move the Statue of Liberty.”
Naturally, she got bored with fashion shoots, and when World War II broke out, decided to become a war correspondent. She wanted to photograph the frontlines, but was denied access until 1945, when the Writer's Review Board finally secured credentials for her. She took full advantage of it.
Her first photograph for LIFE was London, post-blitz; she was the first professional photographer to get permission to take pictures of the 332d Expeditionary Operations Group, better known as the Tuskeegee Airmen.
But even during her first assignment during the war, as “pictorial historian” for the Red Cross, she stayed “true to form,” working “on projects that challenged the status quo,” as the Library of Congress wrote. Her photographs of Red Cross nurses and orphaned children may have quieter than images of the actual warfare, they were no less important.
"The worst part of war, in my opinion,” she said, “is what happens to the survivors.”
Though Frissell’s boredom with fashion magazines began long before her detour into war photography, she picked it back up after returning to the States, doing her her best to continue to — as always — “push the envelope.”
“Frissell's eye for fashion and sports segued neatly into a new iteration,” the Library of Congress wrote. “Throughout her career she produced coverage of trim, athletic women enjoying exercise. Her interests in leisure activities of the wealthy — particularly yachting and skiing — matched those of the new magazine Sports Illustrated, which started publication in 1954. In 1953, she became the first female staff photographer to cover the sports that would appeal to the elite clientele the publishers anticipated.”
In 1957, they sent her to Aspen — these shots, all from the LOC archives, are a tidy combo of her fashion background, her street photography and her love for sports.
“When I was working for Sports Illustrated, I was delighted to be paid to go photograph all the sports that interested me anyway,” she wrote in her memoir. “Sports photography is in itself a sport. I'd rather stalk with a camera than a gun. It really is a game to catch people unawares and talk them into forgetting they are being photographed.”
She returned to Aspen in 1969 to shoot a story for VOGUE on “Ski life.” It was her signature mix of fashion and sport, including this rather outrageous, very-much-of-its era ski ensemble below. Stafford described her mom as "incredibly chic, always on the best-dressed list, completely impractical, fearsomely competitive, unbelievably pushy and whimsical.” She recognized kindred spirits — and often photographed them.
One reason fashion magazines loved to work with Frissell — aside from the quality of her work — was her unfettered access to the glittering Saturn rings of high society. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Aspen found itself in a liminal place in that regard. It was home to old money as well as cultural celebrities with new money, like Hunter Thompson and John Denver, who in turn attracted radicals and countercultural sorts.
“The ‘70s were when the dirty work happened for all these ’60s ideas,” longtime Aspenite Tom Egan said during a history roundtable in 2014. “Here in Aspen, the counterculture was well-entrenched.”
And you can see in Frissell’s photos that its influence was everywhere.
Her Aspen photos of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s capture a lightning-in-a-bottle moment where cultures bled into each other in unexpected ways. Hunter Thompson may’ve thought that the swells and the freaks were two pure tribes, but Frissell’s photos show wealthy families under the heavy influence of the ruling vibe of the late 1960s and ‘70s: houseplants, patchwork, natural fibers, prairie dresses, wood paneling, skylights and bean sprouts curling to live in a mason jar in the kitchen window.
After all, this was the era when folky, puffy-vest wearing John Denver, singing about Rocky Mountain highs and country roads, lived in a luxurious 7,735-square-foot house.
It’s very hard to see evidence of it in her work, but by 1969, Frissell’s health was failing. Her husband asked her, after all these decades of frenetic traveling and working, to please just stop, if only for her own sake. Her late photos, just like her early ones, shine with wit, energy, skill and a wonderfully sideways way of looking at the world.
So Frissell agreed to retire, but not until she’d secured her legacy. She knew that as a woman photographer, her work would probably be forgotten. She began an 800,000-word memoir and donated all of her photographs, negatives and papers to the Library of Congress in 1970. It took them 50 years to process and label it all.
Despite her best efforts to keep her work in the world, it went down the memory hole, perhaps because she was best remembered as a fashion photographer — a genre peceived as grossly commercial, ephemeral and fluffy.
Plimpton told the Times that Frissell’s talent was “catching relationships among people or creating a chronicle of a vanished age. ‘Every photographer I spoke to, including her peers such as Richard Avedon and Cornell Capa, say her work has been neglected.’”
“Over the years, Frissell's name slipped from public recognition,” the LOC wrote. “Now, as more of the photographs are digitizd, her images of famous people and their homes, clothing, activities and events — almost all of which are rights-free — will bring insights into the lives of Americans in the middle of the twentieth century.”
Thirty years after Plimpton tried to remedy the neglect of her work, it’s still under the radar — people may recognize a handful of her images, but she’s anything but a household name.
Photographic Evidence that Once Upon a Time, Aspen was Weird
“It was a wild and glorious time,” old head Art Daily told the Aspen Daily News in 2017. “It was a melting pot of highly independent individuals that had found a place where they could do what they wanted to do, say what they wanted to say, without being judged. ... There weren’t any real class distinctions in Aspen in the ’70s. We were experimenting with life.”
Joe Edwards, Aspen’s former “hippie lawyer,” added that “After the hippies took over, long-hairs could do just about anything they wanted.
“To me it seemed a utopian way to live,” he added. “There was a very open attitude about everything. As long as what you were doing wasn’t threatening to hurt someone or their property, it was ignored.”
That’s what Toni Frissell captured on the dance floor: a mix of cultures, ages, classes, sensibilities. Some people bemoan no longer being able to do openly lines of coke in public at restaurants — apparently that was an Aspen thing in the ‘70s and ‘80s — when that live-and-let-live Utopia is the true loss.
“Aspen Album,” a short film also in the archives of the Colorado Snowsports Museum and Hall of Fame, gives a fun, quick lesson on Aspen’s history, and documents the pre-hippie era — where clothes, haircuts, ski lifts, signs, cars were radically different than they’d be in just four years’ time.
If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, at least scroll to the 17:58 mark for the parade and dog fashion show, including a cameo by a pink poodle:
And here’s footage of the transition from Midcentury Aspen to ‘70s grooviness. There’s some primo footage of a concert/dance floor at about the 11:00 mark:
And in this short, we have peak weird Aspen, the time and place that sparked the rumor it was just a humble ski village that gentrified after the swells discovered it. As we’ve seen, the well-to-do always made a home in Aspen; when you’ve been a destination for un-landed gentry since the 1800s, it’s hard to experience gentrification. But it’s not impossible.
In 2016, the Aspen Times chipperly reported some news that might’ve lit up Hunter Thompson’s peppery little heart: despite ski bums being “a dying breed,” Aspen still harbored a healthy population of them in a part of town dubbed “Ski Bum Island.”
Well, a handful of years later, it’s clear that Ski Bum Island is doomed. In March, the Queen of Aspen Ski Bums, Marian Melville, died at the age of 93; she was new to town when Frissell shot that feature for Sports Illustrated. Heather Hansman, who also identifies as a ski bum, documented the last traces of Aspen ski counterculture in her 2021 book, Powder Days.
Hansman — a smart, sporty woman who would’ve earned Frissell’s respect — dedicates a chapter “to [Aspen’s] Skiers Chalet, charting its evolution since 1960 — from a simple ski lodge to a starry destination to ski bum central to its current lamented tear-down status — as a way of seeing Aspen’s story from the hippie era to today’s supercharged economic inequality and dire housing crisis.”
Utopias and artistic meccas, by their nature, are ephemeral. One may rise again in Aspen, when the times and conditions are right. That fact would depress Hunter Thompson, but get a shrug from Toni Frissell —who knew that sometimes, all you can do is capture a rare and remarkable thing in real time.