There is something oddly mesmerizing about Peter Simon’s recent double-DVD retrospective, Peter Simon’s Through the Lens. Simon, an Island institution who incidentally was the first photo editor of this magazine, began taking pictures as a child at an exclusive prep school in Riverdale, New York. He kept taking them through his anti-war college years at Boston University, his naked commune years in the Vermont hills, his transcendental years trailing around after spiritual teacher Ram Dass, and his well-known rock-and-roll, reggae, and Vineyard years, which overlapped all of the others. It’s no surprise, therefore, that his images capture the life and times of a front-line counterculture pilgrim.

But you can get all that from Simon’s many books, or from the walls of the gallery that he and his wife, Ronni, have on Main Street in Vineyard Haven. What sets Simon’s DVD apart is his commentary, which runs nonstop as the pictures change. He narrates his life with a humble, almost deadpan delivery that makes no excuses, pulls no punches, and is fully aware of both the humor and the hopefulness of it all.

“I went down to Washington to demonstrate against the war,” he says behind a picture of a massive crowd at the Washington Monument in 1969. “It was called Moratorium Day and our goal that day was to levitate the Pentagon. I remember that. That was really what we were thinking…we would levitate the Pentagon.”

Or he might say: “Here is Ram Dass meditating in his recreational vehicle, which was parked at my house in Gay Head,” and there’s the famous guru sitting in a Winnebago. Then the image changes and Simon says: “These are Premies, the name for people who would follow Guru Maharaj Ji around the planet. And they wanted me to come join, but I was way too invested in Ram Dass and the kind of Jewsy schmoozy way that he had going. And this seemed kind of foreign and surreal…”

Not that Simon was ever really spooked by the surreal. Here he is by his own description “barefooted, fully haired-out, full of paisley and smelling like patchouli,” taking pictures of angry police. Or dropping  acid on the way to an early Grateful Dead concert. Or being preppy John Updike’s regular Vineyard golf  buddy.

Simon did, however, have his limits. Of the waning of the naked commune days he reports: “The thing that finally got me in the end was income inequality. My friend and I owned the place and paid all the bills, and everyone else living there were sort of like indentured hippie slaves. And they resented that they were doing kind of the crap work and we were off buying things for the house and fulfilling our role as landlords and masters.”  

“I also am sort of a neat freak and the rest of the people weren’t, so I found that I spent a lot of time just cleaning up.”