The cover of Habicht's book In The Sixties features a photo titled "Live it to the hilt — Renee, Westminster Bridge, 1968". This closeup portrait (somewhat unusual for Habicht) shows his eye for capturing some of the varying currents of the time. Here, Habicht, as typical with his photos, allows the young woman Renee to speak for herself, displaying an edgy and even menacing leather-biker look, knocking stereotyped sex roles for six, but yet combining in exaggerated female-signaling eye makeup common at the time. The dangling hand-rolled smoke (possibly a reefer, demonstrating the newly emergent drug culture, but even if just a cigarette, still slightly outré for women of the dominant culture) and blasé devil-may-care side-eye expression creates a general air of contumacious insouciance to the concerns, restraints, and mores of the conservative post-war British culture formed by war, depression, rationing, and antique values instilled by parents born in the previous century.
Frank Erich Habicht (9 December 1938 – 8 October 2024) was a German-born photographer, best known for his photographs of the emergent new fashions and lifestyles of the young baby boomers of "Swinging London" in the 1960s,[1] documenting the libertarian attitudes which were expressed through fashion, design and political activism,[2] and the class and political divides of that time and place,[3] as the conservative postwar British culture was shouldered aside to make way for a younger generation wanting an unconstrained life with free love, peace and harmony.[4]
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