Paul Kagan

Paul Kagan (1943–1993) was an American photographer, graphic artist, and author. A photographer, graphic artist and author, Kagan is remembered for the rock concert posters featuring his photographs, and graphics published during San Francisco’s psychedelic Sixties and the book of photographs depicting Utopian communities he published in 1975. As a teenager, he was active in political protests; by the time he began college at the University of California at Berkeley, he was listed by the House Un-American Activities Committees as one of the country’s most dangerous radicals. He worked with Family Dog, a production company in San Francisco run by Chet Helms, which organized concerts. In 1966 Kagan photographed Country Joe and the Fish, and the images were used on four covers for albums released in 1967.

New World Utopias Around 1970 Kagan began to research and photograph California Utopian communities. This work was supported first by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health and then by the California Historical Society. Following five years of research, and includes photographs Kagan took when he visited sites of current and former communities. An exhibition of these photographs was mounted at the Oakland Museum in 1975.

By the late 1970s he was working as a photographer with a San Francisco advertising agency, Dailey & Associates, where he won trade group awards for several advertisements featuring his photographs.

Kagan died in New York City in 1993.