ICONS – Elliott Landy: Music and Rebellion
Landy’s fundamentally political eye reflected the cultural landscape of the 1960’s better than most others. He understood that musicians like Jimi Hendrix’s anti-war sentiment were a line in the sand against the increasingly oppressive Vietnam war, and that he could proselytize their message to a massive audience with his photography. How did he reach this position of influence?
Words Holly Wyche
Bob Dylan, 1968
The association between the music of the late 60’s and an antiwar or ‘hippie’ sentiment is in part a result of Landy’s work capturing this feeling. His route into photography was fundamentally a response to the political climate at the time of these musician’s success, with the two becoming intertwined due to his ability to communicate their message to a wider audience. Landy began taking photos in 1967 in a direct effort to help stop the Vietnam War on any scale he could, recording and reporting on any peace demonstrations in New York City he could find. At the time, newspapers and media weren’t interested in reporting on large scale peace demonstrations let alone printing photos of the event. Landy says they’d get ‘two inches in the middle’ if anything at all. In defiance of this, he became a photographer and editor at underground newspapers called The Rat and The New York Free Press. Both of these papers formed in response to the Vietnam War and had common features from the Black Panthers, Gay Rights and Abortion Rights demonstrations. These papers played a major part in the dissent surrounding the Vietnam War, containing exclusive insider stories to key moments like the Columbia University uprising, with Landy’s role as a photographer being key. This background sounds so removed from Landy’s eventual notoriety as a concert photographer, with his shift into the discipline being a complete coincidence, literally stumbling into it on the way home from work.
“You were free to smoke grass, you were free to have sex, you’re free to say what you wanted to say. You tried to find a way of supporting yourself that was in harmony with your inner being and with what you felt you wanted to do in your life; not just go out and get a job and separate your job completely from what your family life was. For me, I was proselytizing with those photographs.”
Walking home past a theatre marquee titled ‘Country Joe and the Fish with Light Show’ Landy was charmed by the name and went backstage with his press pass to chat to the musicians. He says “I just wanted to know what they were doing”. This curiosity is key to how Landy interacts with the world, and gave him almost an innocent sincerity that caused the stars he would end up photographing to be comfortable with him in a way they were with very few. It was this attitude that led to him meeting Janice Joplin two weeks later at the next event he was invited to after Country Joe. Joplin’s show was the first concert he ever photographed, bringing a psychedelic, unrefined blurriness to his photos that attempted to capture the feeling of being in the room with her. Landy wasn’t interested in just capturing a portrait of these people, he felt more like a prophet. After this, they formed a professional relationship that would lead to Landy meeting other icons like Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa, with his professional work becoming a staple of concert photography in little over a year.
Jimi Hendrix, 1968
Frank Zappa, 1968
Janis Joplin, 1968
“Janis Joplin seemed to trust me because she sensed that I was genuine. As a musician and performer, she could intuitively perceive the intentions and authenticity of the people around her. She knew that I was there because I genuinely enjoyed being present and capturing the moments.”
Photographing the album cover of Bob Dylan’s 1969 album, Nashville Skyline, was a major success of this era of Landy’s photography. He talks about these artists with whom he formed close connections with great admiration and privilege, as if he was given access to a rare understanding of these icons that he wanted to share with as many people as possible. This is certainly in part due to the fact that these 1960’s artists were fundamentally political figures as much as they were musicians, bound to an ethos and anti-war sentiment that extended beyond the stage and into spaces like the peace demonstrations that began Landy’s career. To Landy, they are one and the same, and this culminated in Landy’s seminal record of one of the most notable cultural events of the whole decade, Woodstock 1969.
“Love, in its essence, is a connection to the energy of life itself.”
This is where the link between music, politics, and social movements like the hippie all culminated, with figures Landy had photographed like Hendrix and Joplin performing and being photographed by him. The festival was ultimately an act of defiance, a rebellion against the blunt direction of thousands of young men to a uniformed death in the Vietnam War with three days of hedonistic, psychedelic revelry. Hendrix’s performance of the national anthem was described as a “great NO to the war, to racism, to whatever you or he might think of or want gone”, with Hendrix himself writing about the performance that “500,000 halos outshined the mud and history”. This is exactly what Landy’s photos manage to capture, and why his record of the event has become gospel. The photos he captures of singers wandering through the crowd, and young men hanging shirtless on radio towers have almost a prescience to them that is so compelling even now. They don’t feel historical or as if Landy captured a moment trapped in time. Instead, it feels like he’s almost projecting a feeling outward, forward in time to prove just how powerful that spirit of rebellion that first moved him to photograph is. To prove that no matter in what form, through photo or march or through music, that spirit will always remain.
Perhaps this is why Landy’s later work, while moving, didn’t reach the same commercial notoriety as his work in the 60’s. While the music and photographic record of that time lives on, the dream of the hippie is all but gone. Landy is still very successful however, and has had multiple very successful projects such as an omnibus of all of his previous photos of self-titled music group, ‘The Band’. The project raised $193,000 compared to its intended $35,000 goal. Landy also created a music video editing software titled Landyvision, available on the Appstore for $299. The app is certainly unique and is immediately apparent as having been born from the hippie sentiment core to him.
Grace Slick Woodstock Festival, 1969
Nashville Skyline cover, 1968
“I never thought about the future. I never thought I did anything special. However, I did save my photographs, and you know what? I almost didn’t save them. That’s how little I thought about it at the time.”
In this regard, Landy’s influence over music photography lives on decades past his most impactful work. The photo he took of Bob Dylan for the Nashville Skyline album was the first picture ever taken of Dylan smiling, and the humanity he brought to these untouchable, almost religious figures is reflected in both the practices and goals of concert photography even decades later. This sincerity is an ultimate secret that is as simple as it is forgettable.
With the Grammy’s just having taken place, it’s worth looking at just how these invisible photographers interact with these stars in the photos taken. Chappell Roan’s notable interaction with a photographer at last year’s Grammy’s where she refused barked orders to pose comes to mind. Landy had a humanity that is sometimes noticeably absent in the industry that music photography has become, and we are all the worse for it.
“My approach was driven by my own passion for photography, not external demands from magazines or commercial interests.”
Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm at Big Pink in Woodstock, NY in 1969
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