Photographer Bill Yates unearths album of photos taken at Sweetheart Rink, Florida | Daily Mail Online
▻http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3249720/Meet-kids-Sweetheart-Rink-Photographer-unearths-incredible-album-portra
They are a collection of hundreds of photos that capture an incredible moment in time and history.
But the series of snapshots of a rural Florida rollerskating rink in 1972 and 73 have been languishing in a box pretty much since they were taken - until now.
The Sweetheart Rink was the place to be in downtown Tampa when student photographer Bill Yates, who was then 26, stumbled upon it during his final year at the University of South Florida. ’That was big time, going to the skating rink,’ he told The Bitter Southerner.
By the summer of 1973, Yates had become as commonplace at Sweethearts as Pepsi and cigarettes. He took around 800 photos of the many walks of life that hung out there each weekend.
He said the era was a very exciting time for everyone. ’You had the Women’s Movement and the Civil Rights movement. You had Vietnam raging. You had the hippies. You had sex, drugs and rock and roll. Music was changing dramatically. All that stuff from California had moved east.’
His photos gained him admission to the graduate photography program at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was encouraged to ’start from scratch’. So he put his Sweetheart pictures and negatives into a box and forgot about them for more than three decades.
It was only when he was looking back over his career that he decided to get them out and take another look. The incredible snaps will now be displayed at New Orleans’ Ogden Museum of Southern Art from October 3.