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In 1970, a young and depressed Winnipeg photographer accepted an assignment from the National Film Board of Canada to document the country's youth culture. Gerry Kopelow hit the road armed with his camera and film and spent the summer “stalking,” as he puts it in the introduction, the denizens of outdoor music festivals and downtown protests from Winnipeg to Toronto.

The images Kopelow gather stayed on a shelf for 40 years, until he took a chance and submitted them for exhibition to the art gallery at the University of Winnipeg. They were accepted, so Kopelow, today a successful commercial photographer, then approached University of Manitoba Press to see if they might be suitable for publication.

The result is All Our Changes, a one-of-a-kind document about a brief moment in this country's history that captures both the self-indulgence of the hippie movement and its vital hope for a better world.

All Our Changes: Images from the Sixties Generation, by Gerry Kopelow, University of Manitoba Press, 158 pages, $39.95

Most of the photos in the book revolve around Winnipeg's active music scene and many festivals of that era – one which produced the Guess Who, the Electric Jug and Blues Band, and the Fifth. It was an incredible summer for music in Winnipeg, which saw Janis Joplin and The Grateful come through the city as part of the Festival Express, and Led Zeppelin and Iron Butterfly appear at Man-Pop, a concert organized by the provincial government. (Kopelow lost the colour slides he took of Led Zeppelin.)

There are also shots from the Mariposa Folk Festival on Toronto's Centre Island that summer, including one of Joni Mitchell at the height of her popularity.

And then there are unassuming and moving pictures of young Canadians on the road; the hopeful, freewheeling children of the Sixties who spent the summer hitchhiking across the county and crashing at the homes of friends and strangers.

One of the best things about the book is the introductory conversation between Kopelow and an interviewer, in which Kopelow tells the moving story of how he discovered photography while growing up in Winnipeg's immigrant-fed South End.

He discusses frankly the depression he suffered through his youth, and how the gift of a camera from a teacher turned his life around. His unhappiness turns out to be a blessing, in the sense that it gave him a sense of being an outsider – essential for a photographer – and seems also to have immunized him against the euphoric dogma of the era he was paid to put on film.

All Our Changes

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“Stalking. That's what I did. I stalked situations,” Kopelow says.

“My stalking involved discarding moments that seemed false to me, that seemed pretentious, and looking for unguarded moments. I was interested in faces in repose, not faces that were posed, but faces that were in repose, because I felt they represented a more authentic view of the interior.”

He later adds: “Here was this particular bubble when a lot of people did change. Nowadays, it's thought of by people who didn't experience it as quaint, cute and silly, which it was. But there were aspects of this era which were, I hesitate to use the word, noble, but were much more authentic, much more profound, and worth looking at.”