The Family Acid

The Family Acid is forty years of Roger Steffens' own life in colour slide film, from the Psychological Operations unit he served in during the Vietnam War to the decades of rastas, beatniks, musicians, gonzo journalists and family that followed.

The 72 plates are culled from an archive of more than 40,000 chromes. Steffens photographed his circle continuously and experimentally, layering double exposures and pushing saturated colour, so the book runs closer to a psychedelic diary than a documentary record. Texts come from his children Kate and Devon Steffens, who now maintain the archive under the Family Acid name and select from it for exhibitions and prints. S U N published it in 2015 in an edition of 1,000, clothbound and foil stamped across 156 pages.

Steffens (b. 1942) is better known as a reggae historian: host of the syndicated radio programme The Reggae Beat, a founding editor of The Beat, and author of So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley (2017). The Family Acid archive has since produced further volumes, California and Jamaica, the latter drawing on the reggae photographs the first book largely set aside.