In his lifetime, Roger Steffens has been a decorated Vietnam veteran, radio and TV host, journalist, photographer, and a highly regarded reggae scholar. He's been a part of counterculture movements for almost 50 years, enjoying a psychedelic cruise that's taken him from Saigon and Marrakech, to Berkeley and Big Sur, settling in Jamaica and Los Angeles. All the while, he's brought a camera with him, photographing places and people he has grown to love.

Now in his 70s, he's found another audience with The Family Acid, an Instagram account curated by his children that provides a view into his dynamic world – a life led by curiosity, deep connections and creativity – all captured on film.

Steffens lives in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles with his massive reggae archives divided into a serpentine, seven-room arrangement in the basement. Born into a religious Irish family from Brooklyn, N.Y., he spent most of his adolescence raised in a predominantly right-wing community in Northern New Jersey, attended Catholic school for 15 years and is a proud American Legion state oratory champion of 1960.

But Steffens eventually distanced himself from conservative worldviews. He pursued radio broadcasting in New York, where he had hang sessions with legendary rock and roll disc jockey Alan Freed. He met young television star Betty White and journalist Mike Wallace, who would go on to be a reporter for 60 Minutes. Steffens first on-air interview was with Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, and his appreciation for international musicians would later influence recording artists and people within his own circle. "I was largely responsible for turning Paul Simon onto African music," he said, which eventually resulted in the singer working with Ladysmith Black Mambazo on the Grammy-winning Graceland album.

Just as Steffens began to explore radio, at the age of 25-years-old, he was drafted into the army's psychological operations unit in the Vietnam War. When he arrived in Saigon, he was assigned to carry 80 pounds of loudspeaker backpacks into front-line combat zones blaring messages of “surrender.”

When the Tet Offensive broke out in the beginning of 1968, 52 families took shelter, living in sewer pipes outside of Steffens's barracks. Steffens wrote to friends in the states — particularly in Racine, Wis., where he had read poetry for years in the schools — and in an earnest request, he asked for assistance. This was the start of a two-year campaign that raised over 100 tons of food and clothing. Pleased with his community service, he was given his own section for civic action projects. Over 26-months of service, he photographed over 20,000 frames, which he still calls "happy accidents." The black and white images include stills of street life, motorcycles, and smiles of camaraderie. Steffens was later awarded a Bronze Star for his work.

During his deployment, Steffens rolled with a motley crew, befriending characters like John Steinbeck IV, son of The Grapes of Wrath writer, and Sean Flynn, son of actor Errol Flynn, both of whom reported from Vietnam as war correspondents. With surmounting deaths, and chaos, Steffens became frustrated with the war, and ended up on the Island of Coconut Monk, a mile-long strip of land in the middle of the Mekong River that had been turned into a refuge for deserters. This is where he met his first wife, Cynthia Copple.

Returning home to the U.S., Steffens spent most of 1970 lecturing against the war. Everywhere he went, people wanted to hear his story about Vietnam. "I had taken so many pictures, I was able to share slideshows and explain how I came to feel the way I did," he said. Steffens returned to a country he hardly recognized. It was a fraught time, politically, with student protests under attack, and civil unrest, he said. Steffens decided to leave the U.S., and travel along with his wife to Marrakech where they found a place in the cobblestone town of Medina.

After enjoying a freewheeling, expat lifestyle, Steffens transplanted himself back to the Bay Area and got a place in Berkeley, Calif. There he took snapshots of musicians, artists, writers, bohemians and eccentrics who would revolutionize a generation's idea of creative freedom. "I didn't have time to write a journal because I was so busy living, and I was surrounded by so many larger than life characters that I thought I should at least have a picture of them," Steffens said.

In the summer of 1973, Steffens met Tim Page, the famed war correspondent and inspiration for Dennis Hopper's character in Apocalypse Now. The two were supposed to link up in Saigon in 1969, but that day Page sustained a brain injury when a person in front of him stepped on a landmine. "This was the fourth time he had been wounded," Steffens said. The two instantly became friends bonding over shared trauma, and an unmatched rebelliousness.

While Page taught Steffens some photography techniques, it was Ron Kovic, the anti-war activist and writer, who turned him onto double exposures. Steffens had experimented with light streaks and time exposures, but he came to embrace this striated style inadvertently. Kovic was writing Born on the Fourth of July while traveling with Steffens on his annual poetry tour when a last minute trip between photojournalist Richard Boyle and Kovic cut their excursion short. "So, Kovic and Boyle, in the midst of a haze, took a cab to the border to Parrot's Beak [in Cambodia] and then to Phnom Penh," Steffens shared.

Kovic returned, and accidentally left an unwound roll in Steffens's camera bag. "I thought it was a fresh roll of film, so I put it in my camera and that day, shot at an antebellum mansion in Cincinnati," Steffens said.

The resulting juxtapositions were startling. Steffens took a picture of a stained glass window that formed into the shape of a pair of deep, oval eyes. Within that optical illusion, an image of a Cambodian refugee woman stood holding her baby in closed arms. "I thought this was incredible – if only I could do this on purpose instead of an accident," Steffens said. "From that point forward, I set out very deliberately to conceive things in my mind and recreate them photographically. I didn’t have a grid on my camera or any way of memorizing what the first image was, so I would try to get things to match parts of it on the second image."

Some of these visual narratives spun into colorful caftan silhouettes at Stonehenge, two-dimensional rings of light projected onto Redwood trees, and sunflowers over wooden cottages in Corralitos, Calif. These pictures, like many others, were tucked away for decades hidden under Steffens's reggae ephemera.

Steffens was turned on to reggae in 1973 by an article in Rolling Stone: Michael Thomas wrote, "Reggae crawls into your bloodstream like some vampire amoeba from the psychic rapids of an Upper Niger consciousness." Steffens, unaware what this meant, had to find out. "I bought [Bob Marley's] Catch a Fire album and The Harder They Come film that night. It changed my life forever," he said.

Steffens, having just moved to Los Angeles, realized there was a void for reggae enthusiasts. Steffens coincidently met Hank Holmes, a serious vinyl collector who had roughly 8,000 rare reggae records. Together, they started a show on KCRW in 1978, one of LA's National Public Radio affiliates. Reggae Beat ran every Sunday afternoon for 10 years and was syndicated on over 130 stations. Steffens also added an African music show on Tuesday mornings.

His career in reggae would follow with a television show, Offbeat, an internationally distributed publication, The Beat Magazine, a multimedia show, My Life with Bob Marley and, eventually, six published books under his belt. As Steffens describes, it developed naturally – nothing he could predict or consciously set out to do. "I had to be open and alert to possibilities," he said.

Steffens's basement is divided into multiple rooms each labeled with titles – Reggae Reception Center, Reggae Cave, and Reggae Decompression Chamber. The space is filled to the brim with thousands of fliers, buttons, posters – most of them signed by the original artists – vintage tee shirts, hours of video footage, and 13 drawers of alphabetized Bob Marley clippings.

Fittingly, at the center of his sought-after collection is an area dedicated to Bob Marley. Steffens first met the icon in Santa Cruz when he was invited backstage after a concert. The following year, Holmes and Steffens got invited to go with Marley on the road for two weeks – the two, he said, slept on the floor of the tour bus.

Steffens memorializes pastimes with coveted unreleased audio clips, interviews, outtakes, and rehearsals all categorized and catalogued in pristine condition. Among these relics are amassed soundboard tapes from concerts and endless tribute shows. A standout collectible – a framed poster signed by Marley, includes 39 of his relatives, friends and band members. When Steffens loaned it to the Grammy Museum a couple of years ago, it was insured for $75,000.

The Reggae Vault contains "precious" objects Steffens said. There's an envelope signed by Haile Selassie postmarked at the United Nations on the day the Ethiopian leader made the "War" speech, which Marley later set to music on the Rastaman Vibration album. Steffens also holds the original pressing of “The Harder They Come” soundtrack, signed by director Perry Henzell, musician Jimmy Cliff, record producer Chris Blackwell, and singer-songwriter Desmond Dekker.

Steffens speaks to each piece, recounting moments with careful detail and lasting impressions. One of his greatest musical memories dates back with Marley. "I was with him for his final show's soundcheck at the Roxy Theater in LA, November '79," he said. "It was a three-hour soundcheck. He played all the instruments himself, and the first hour he kept singing something over and over again about redemption, and that was, of course, 'Redemption Song.'"

Steffens and his current wife, Mary Steffens, visited Marley in Jamaica often. The two actually met during an acid trip, he said, while in a pygmy forest in Mendocino "under a total eclipse of the moon" on Memorial Day, 1975. “I tried LCD before I even smoked herb," Steffens continued. "In Vietnam I needed something to cut the tension and I didn’t want to drink. Acid was the game changer for everybody. We saw behind the veil, we saw god in the atmosphere. We knew there were other dimensions with possibilities and that's where the poets and the mystics had drawn their inspiration from, and it was available in an instant."

These parallel dimensions crept their way into every aspect of his life, creating an alternative way of seeing the world. "It all comes back to acid," Steffens said. "That's what I was trying to do with double exposure. I tried expose the pattern beneath the pattern, the underpinnings, the superstructure."

Steffens has managed to take another trip – one that has connected generations, from past to present – and showed us a glimpse into his unconventionally beautiful life. His daughter Kate Steffens, culling pieces of her childhood and a time before her, taking us to an era culturally mythologized. There were roughly 100,000 photos that no one outside the Steffens family had ever seen — a closet full of slides that his son Devon Marley Steffens spent two years digitizing. Kate put together a deal with Los Angeles-based art book publisher, SUN Editions, leading to the release of their first photo book, The Family Acid.

"My daughter, having studied photography in high school and college, is truly my curator. She was digging things up I had never seen," Steffens said. "I am constantly surprised when I wake up in the morning and look at the site. My children gave me a new life and direction."

Photos by Eilea Jimenez and courtesy of Family Acid