Woodstock:pictures and a thousand words

The images photographer Elliott Landy came away with from a three-day weekend in upstate New York in 1969 captured 500,000 souls and the essence of an entire generation.

The official photographer of the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival however, says covering music wasn't his top priority during the culturally explosive 1960s. Nonetheless, he found himself with camera in hand at the forefront of a powerful buzz that drove the revolution-as-evolution ethic for his generation.

'I was born and raised in the Bronx where I spent the first 20 years of my life, but I really grew up when I went to Europe,' says Landy, a free-lance photographer who traveled to Denmark on his first professional assignment in 1966. He was in his early 20s.

Landy covered anti-war protests and demonstrations for abortion rights during the culturally turbulent decade, as well as celebrity-laden events whose glamour rapidly faded in the photographer's eyes, dissolving into an artificial world of ego trips and sensationalist-seeking establishment media. The medium was changing, as well.

'I often shot in black-and-white and in color. There were no computers then, and the magazines wanted them either one way or the other,' says Landy, never one to shy away from technological advances.

'The peace demonstrations and the Hollywood celebrities were better (suited to) black-and-white,' he says of his early images of a bejeweled Elizabeth Taylor, Marlene Dietrich and Richard Burton.

Home in the 1960s was a small, first-floor apartment on the west side of Manhattan, where he built an eight-foot sink to serve as his darkroom. The walls were lined with shelves and stacked with negatives, chemicals and books on photography. His time was spent taking pictures, then going home and processing the film from late at night until the early morning.

When Bill Graham opened the Fillmore East in the spring of 1968, Landy had free run of the place.

His images from the era include Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, The Who - captured wailing amid sonic carnage of acrid smoke - and an intense Jimi Hendrix, cutting an imposing figure against the multi-colored splash of the Joshua Light show in the background. Watching Janis Joplin, he says, is a personally favorite memory.

'Going to the Fillmore and seeing Janis play really encapsulated the rock 'n' roll psychedelic head-trip experience,' Landy says.

As a result of his Joplin assignments, he was hired by The Band to visit their house in Woodstock. On Easter weekend in 1968, while the instruments and microphones were set up downstairs where the group recorded the 'Basement Tapes' with Bob Dylan, Landy shot the Civil War-style inspired photographs that became the art for The Band's album, 'Music From Big Pink.'

Magazine cover assignments followed in Life magazine, Rolling Stone and the Saturday Evening Post, as well as album cover art for Van Morrison's 'Moondance' and work with Bob Dylan.

Dylan was living a reclusive life at the time following his motorcycle accident. Landy and Dylan became friends, allowing the photographer to shoot intimate family pictures - a rarely seen side of Dylan - including Dylan's wife Sara and the couple's small children. His most enigmatic pictures captured Dylan in a humorous moment that eventually graced his 'Nashville Skyline' album, and of him sitting in front of an old British cab at his Woodstock home.

In the summer of 1969, concert organizer Michael Lang rode his motorcycle to Landy's Woodstock house to ask if he would be interested in photographing a festival he was planning nearby. With little more than a verbal agreement, Landy became the Woodstock Music Festival's official photographer.

In the 1970s, Landy was happy to escape the commercial demands of photography, spending most of the decade traveling around Europe with his family, his lens capturing more personal moments with his children.

Landy returned to Woodstock to live in 1990. With a view of the mountains, he has found the 'mellow peacefulness' many of his generation were seeking. Musically these days, he has a preference for singer-songwriter Tom Pacheco and artists local to the Woodstock community like Leslie Ritter and Scott Petito. He probably embodies the Woodstock 'spirit' as well as anyone on the planet, documenting in images, and expressing in words:

'They came looking for music and new ways.
They found a hard path - there were miles to walk; rain and mud;
not much food to eat, nor shelter to sleep beneath; life was not as they usually knew it.
But something happened.
There was peace and harmony despite the conditions.
Woodstock became a symbol to the world of a better way of life - of freedom, of love, of spiritual union between many. There was hope.'

'Nearly 500,000 people gathered together to celebrate life,' writes Landy in his 1994 book 'Woodstock Vision, the Spirit of a Generation,' a first-person photographic journey released in 1994 to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the festival.

The promise of that hope he says, is not an overnight achievement, but something that continues to blossom. 'The coming of a new consciousness,' he says 'is a slow process.'

by Thomas Dimopoulos
published in The Saratogian, June 2004.