(Book). Elliott Landy has his finger on the pulse of the Woodstock generation. He was there before the famous festival, hanging out with Dylan and The Band; he was the photographer of record at the festival itself; and he still lives in Woodstock today. Here he captures and preserves the true vision and pure essence of that incredibly influential event what it was like to be part of the '60s, sharing the spirit of unlimited hope, optimism, and the belief that the world can be made better through peace and love.
(Book). Once in a while a photographer gains the trust of an artist or a band, and his work fuses with that of the artist in such a way that the two become married in the public consciousness. One can think of David Duncan's pictures of Picasso at work or Alfred Wertheimer's pictures of Elvis backstage in 1956. Elliott Landy's chronicle of The Band from 1968-1969 is of similar importance. He was trusted so deeply that this group of photographs is as intimate a portrait of a group of musicians inventing a new music as you are ever likely to come across. Today we call that music "Americana," and it is played all over the world by everyone from Mumford and Sons to the Zac Brown Band. But in 1968, when Elliott first started making these pictures, it was played by six musicians in the town of Woodstock, New York Bob Dylan and a group called The Hawks. They later changed their name to The Band. They had been The Hawks for five years when Bob Dylan pulled them out of Tony Mart's dive bar on the Jersey Shore to be his band.
Woodstock Then and Now is a first-hand transcription of a series of roundtable discussions and interviews with "Woodstock luminaries" held at the Berklee College of Music in April 2019. Here, the words of Michael Lang (Woodstock cofounder) Chip Monck (emcee, stage and lighting designer), Bill Hanley (audio engineer), Henry Diltz and Elliott Landy (photographers), Rona Elliot (public relations), and Gerardo Velez (percussionist for Jimi Hendrix) are presented for scholars and fans alike. Meeting all together for the first time since 1969, these luminaries shared Woodstock stories, talking about the impact of the festival on their careers and on society as a whole.
With his thumbprint on the most ubiquitous films of childhood, Walt Disney is widely considered to be the most conventional of all major American moviemakers. The adjective "Disneyfied" has become shorthand for a creative work that has abandoned any controversial or substantial content to find commercial success. But does Disney deserve that reputation? Douglas Brode overturns the idea of Disney as a middlebrow filmmaker by detailing how Disney movies played a key role in transforming children of the Eisenhower era into the radical youth of the Age of Aquarius. Using close readings of Disney projects, Brode shows that Disney's films were frequently ahead of their time thematically. Long before the cultural tumult of the sixties, Disney films preached pacifism, introduced a generation to the notion of feminism, offered the screen's first drug-trip imagery, encouraged young people to become runaways, insisted on the need for integration, advanced the notion of a sexual revolution, created the concept of multiculturalism, called for a return to nature, nourished the cult of the righteous outlaw, justified violent radicalism in defense of individual rights, argued in favor of communal living, and encouraged antiauthoritarian attitudes. Brode argues that Disney, more than any other influence in popular culture, should be considered the primary creator of the sixties counterculture—a reality that couldn't be further from his "conventional" reputation.
William Blake and the Age of Aquarius / by Stephen F. Eisenman -- Prophets, madmen, and millenarians: Blake and the (counter)culture of the 1790s / by Mark Crosby -- William Blake on the West Coast / Elizabeth Ferrell -- William Blake and art against surveillance / Jacob Henry Leveton -- Building Golgonooza in the Age of Aquarius / John Murphy -- "My teacher in all things": Sendak, Blake, and the visual language of childhood / Mark Crosby -- Blake then and now / W.J.T. Mitchell
Michael Kramer draws on new archival sources and interviews to explore sixties music and politics through the lens of these two generation-changing places--San Francisco and Vietnam. From the Acid Tests of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters to hippie disc jockeys on strike, the military's use of rock music to "boost morale" in Vietnam, and the forgotten tale of a South Vietnamese rock band, The Republic of Rock shows how the musical connections between the City of the Summer of Love and war-torn Southeast Asia were crucial to the making of the sixties counterculture. The book also illustrates how and why the legacy of rock music in the sixties continues to matter to the meaning of citizenship in a global society today. --from publisher description
Taking Woodstock is the funny, touching, and true story of Elliot Tiber, the man who was instrumental in arranging the site for the original Woodstock Concert. Elliot, whose parents owned an upstate New York motel, was working in Greenwich Village in the summer of 1969. He socialized with the likes of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and yet somehow managed to keep his gay life a secret from his family. Then on Friday, June 28, Elliot walked into the Stonewall Inn—and witnessed the riot that would galvanize the American gay movement and enable him to take stock of his own lifestyle. And on July 15, when Elliot learned that the Woodstock Concert promoters were unable to stage the show in Wallkill, he offered to find them a new venue. Soon he was swept up in a vortex that would change his life forever.
"The approximately 172,000 film negatives and transparencies in the Library of Congress's collection from the Farm Security Administration (FSA), later the Office of War Information (OWI), provide a unique view of American life during the Great Depression and World War II. This government photography project, headed by Roy E. Stryker, employed many relatively unknown names who later became some of the twentieth-century's best-known photographers, such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, and Carl Mydans. Initially conceived to document government loans to farmers and their subsequent resettlement in suburban communities, the project expanded to create a visual record of agricultural workers across the United States. Later, Stryker's photographers recorded both rural and urban centers as the nation prepared for World War II. Each volume in the Fields of Vision series features an introduction to the work of a single FSA photographer by a leading contemporary author or writer, and presents fifty striking images that show how the particular vision of these photographers helped shape the collective identity of America. Their evocative pictures transport the viewer to American homes, farms, and streets of the 1930s and 1940s, while offering a glimpse of a new narrative and intimate style that was later to blossom on the pages of Look and Life magazines. For many Americans of the pre-television age, the diversity and complexity of their country was defined by the lenses of these men and women. This volume focuses on the photographs of Marion Post Wolcott"--
The definitive account of the most famous music festival of all time: Woodstock. “[A] vivid and lively account of those hectic and historic three days….The best fly-on-the-wall account, tantamount to having had a backstage pass to an iconic event.” —New York Post The Woodstock music festival of 1969 is an American cultural touchstone, and no book captures the sights, sounds, and behind-the-scenes machinations of the historic gathering better than Michael Lang’s New York Times bestseller, The Road to Woodstock. USA Today calls this fascinating, entertaining, and blissfully nostalgic look back, “Invaluable.” In The Road to Woodstock, Michael Lang recaptures the magic for the generation that was there…and for the generations that followed. Just in time for the 50th Anniversary of the Woodstock festival, this definitive volume tells you everything you need to know about the most famous three days in music history.
Featuring the indelible work of the eleven photographers who worked for the Farm Security Administration ? perhaps the finest photographic team assembled in the twentieth century ? A Vision Shared: A Classic Portrait of America and Its People 1935?1943 was published in 1976 to great acclaim, and was named one of the hundred most important books of the decade by the Association of American Publishers. John Collier, Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Theo Jung, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, John Vachon and Marion Post Wolcott were invited by Hank O?Neal to choose the best of their own work, and provide commentary.0For the fortieth anniversary edition of this remarkable volume, all of the photographs, text and historical material that made up the original edition have been carefully reproduced, followed by a new afterword by O?Neal detailing the events that followed the book?s initial release.
