“The stumbling of last year – so well intentioned – will not be repeated. I forsee peace and productivity”
Timothy Leary, Oaaca, Mexico 1962
Leary Letter
to
Prof & Mrs David McClelland
July 10 1962
The Photographer Leary mentions is Bruce Conner a San Francisco photographer.
Bruce Conner shot the bulk of its 16mm color footage between 1961 and 1962 while living in Mexico City, where he temporarily relocated in an effort to escape the persistent threat of nuclear war in the United States. The purported subject of the film is, as its title suggests, a “mushroom hunt,” in which Conner ventured to a rural village in Oaxaca, Mexico, in search of hallucinatory psilocybin mushrooms that Indigenous Mazatec people ingest during shamanistic rituals. Conner was accompanied on at least one of these mushroom-hunting excursions by Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychology professor who, by the mid-1960s, had emerged as the foremost public spokesperson for lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD).
Johanna Gosse, Altered States: Psychedelic Experimental Cinema as Border Crossing.
Bruce Conner’s LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959–1967) is a three-minute experimental film by San Francisco–based artist and filmmaker Bruce Conner.1 Conner shot the bulk of its 16mm color footage between 1961 and 1962 while living in Mexico.