Frank Habicht

The cover of Habicht's book In The Sixties features a photo titled "Live it to the hilt — Renee, Westminster Bridge, 1968". This closeup portrait (unusual for Halbicht) shows his eye for capturing some of the varying currents of the time. Here, Halbicht typically allows the young woman Renee to speak for herself, displaying an edgy and even menacing leather-biker look, knocking stereotyped sex roles for six, but yet combining in exaggerated female-signaling eye makeup common at the time. The dangling cigarette (smoking by women had still been slightly outré for women not long ago) and blasé devil-may-care expression creates a general air of contumacious insouciance to the concerns, restraints, and mores of the older post-war British culture.

Frank Habicht (born December 1938 in Hamburg) is a German-born photographer, best known for his photographs of the emergent new fashions and lifestyles of the young baby boomers of "Swinging London" in the 1960s, documenting the libertarian attitudes which were expressed through fashion, design and political activism, and the class and political divides of that time and place, as the conservative postwar British culture was shouldered aside to make way for a younger generation wanting an unconstrained life with free love, peace and harmony.

Habicht attended the Hamburg School of Photography in 1962, and soon relocated to London. There, Habicht worked as a freelance photographer (for publications including Esquire, The Sunday Times, and The Guardian), still photographer for movies, and as photographer for the London Playboy Club and Top of the Pops. He took his black-and-photographs with, usually, a compact Rolleiflex. He took his photos in the street, at concerts, at rallies. Some were crowd shots, some close-ups of individuals. Most were candid photography of street denizens, but he also staged photos with models, sometimes nude (and sometimes in public places), and some of celebrities he had met in his movie and other work, such as Mick Jagger and Vanessa Redgrave.

His book "Young London, Permissive Paradise" was published in the late 1960s, and "In the Sixties" in 1997. His film still photographer work included The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970) and Mesmerized (1985), and he had a small acting role in What We Do in the Shadows (2014).

Habicht moved to New Zealand in 1981, and since then has photographed the life and landscapes of Bay of Islands where he lives. He has published the books "Bay of Islands: Where the Sunday Grass is Greener" (a satirical pictorial of the area) and "Bay of Islands: A Paradise Found".

His "Karma Sixties" collection was exhibited in 2004 at the Colette Gallery in Paris, and other exhibitions of his photographs have been at the Arterium Gallery in Moscow (2008), the Barbican Centre in London (2016), the Manchester Art Gallery (2016-2017), and the Beetles and Huxley Gallery in London.