Lynn Adler is a photographer and documentary filmmaker. In 1965, as a college student, she took a train from Philadelphia to Greensboro, Alabama, to join the voter registration campaign of the civil rights movement. A friend had given her a camera, but she left it under her bed all summer. She has regretted that ever since.
After her mother died suddenly in 1968, she found her mother's old Olympus camera in the attic. This time she embraced photography. By 1970 she was in San Francisco, where she and other photographers founded Optic Nerve, a collective that focused on social issues and American culture. In 1972 the group turned to portable video and made documentaries about beauty pageants, rodeos, county jails and truck stops. In 1980 she and two other former members created the partnership Ideas in Motion. She never stopped taking photographs.
Her book And So We Moved to Petaca was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2026. It has 144 pages and 96 black-and-white photographs. Adler visited the village of Petaca in northern New Mexico over four years in the early 1970s. She shot with a Leica M4 and Tri-X film. The book shows the daily life of Hispano families, and newcomers from the counterculture who settled in the area.
