65 pages Edited by Mark Iosifescu Text(s) by Ken Werner Photographs by Ken Werner Designed by Jesse Pollock 28.2 x 23.3 cm Language: English Hardback Publisher: Anthology Editions Second edition 2024
First published in 1981 in a rare, small-run edition, Ken Werner’s Halloween is a cult classic of underground photography, now reissued for the first time in decades. Shot between 1976 and 1980, Werner’s images capture San Francisco’s infamous adult Halloween celebrations, a wildly subversive street carnival once hailed as the “Mardi Gras of the West.”
Organized largely by LGBT activists and sex worker advocates, these raucous nighttime gatherings drew tens of thousands, scandalized conservative America, and created a stage where humor, desire, and the macabre collided. Werner’s lens transforms the revelry into a dreamlike spectacle: self-made costumes blending cartoon absurdity with sexual excess, grotesque parody with black humor, pagan echoes with irreverent twists on American mythologies.
Part visual archive, part fever dream, Halloween is a time capsule of liberation and chaos at the twilight of the 1970s, an unfiltered portrait of a community claiming the night with joy, terror, and radical imagination.
