The personality difference in Elliott Landy’s pictures of Janis Joplin is dramatic, to say the least. In live concert shots, pulsating with the saturated psychedelic colors of a light show swirling around her, she’s a DayGlo dynamo, burning brightly like a carnival fireworks display.
But in monochromatic moments, those little alone times backstage, sad and lost in thought, perhaps nursing a cup of tea in a diner or waiting for a ride to the next show, she’s someone else; perhaps the little girl blue she sang about. But which is the real Janis Joplin, the searing performer shredding her soul before the audience or the wounded waif buried behind it all? It’s something to contemplate while gazing at Photographs of Janis Joplin: On the Road & On Stage (Backbeat Books), the legendary Woodstock photographer’s beautiful new book of images of the rock icon.
“The first time I saw Janis perform was with [her then band] Big Brother and the Holding Company, at the Anderson Theater on Second Avenue on the Lower East Side, on February 17, 1968,” recalls Landy, who had previously been a paparazzi-style photographer for celebrity magazines and was then working for underground New York paper The Rat. “It was one of the first rock ’n’ roll concerts I saw, and my second one at the Anderson—I’d seen Country Joe and the Fish there, two weeks earlier—and it’s still one of the most powerful concerts I’ve ever seen.”
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