Capturing images of a unique group of musicians as they created their own genre of music.
Elliott Landy is the photographer who will be forever associated with Woodstock. One of the first music photographers to be recognised for his art, he is associated with some of the most iconic photos of the biggest acts of the 60s and early 70s. In particular, he is known for his photos of Dylan and his group of backing musicians that came to be known as The Band. In 2016 he published a volume of his photos of The Band, ‘The Band Photographs 1968–1969’. Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, it became the highest funded photographic book in Kickstarter history. Now he’s back with a new Kickstarter campaign to fund the production of a second volume of photographs from the same period. Photos that he hadn’t realised he still had until he discovered some stray boxes in his studio. The Kickstarter campaign closes on the 7th April and all information can be found here.
I know you’ve been asked this many times, but I’m going to ask it again anyway. How did you get into all this in the first place? You didn’t set out to be a music photographer, did you. Didn’t you want to, originally, do more reportage.
Yeah. So it was 1967 and I wanted to do something to help stop the Vietnam War. And my first thought was I’ll go to Vietnam, take pictures and show how bad war is. And my second thought is, I don’t want to be killed. I don’t want to be in a war. So I got the idea to photograph the peace demonstrations that were going on in New York City. And very often there would be a demonstration in Manhattan that was a fair size, and the New York Times would give it two inches in the middle of the newspaper and without any pictures at all. So, basically, there was no significant coverage of it or what the demonstrators were saying about the war. So, I started to do that. And the mainstream media was not interested in photographs of peace demonstrations, it got very little coverage. I went to the so-called underground newspapers and there was one called the New York Free Press, and another one was called The Rat. And I began working as a photo editor for The Rat. We photographed peace demonstrations and abortion rights demonstrations. And one evening when I had gotten finished with the paper, the office was on Seventh Street, off Second Avenue. I was walking along Second Avenue and I see a theater marquee that says, Country Joe and the Fish with Light Show. And I thought, what is that? What is Country Joe and the Fish? And what is the light show? But I had no idea really. So, I went over to the box office and I heard this incredible music coming out of the theater.
Read the full article here: Americana.uk.com
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