The first shots were of the band sitting on a bench with their backs to the camera. It wasn’t quite what they wanted, so Landy came back for a second shoot, which also wasn’t quite right. When he returned for the third shoot, he had some definite ideas. “I’d gotten to know them, and they were all very earthy people with rural backgrounds, a little old-fashioned. They wanted to espouse tradition. By chance I had a book of Matthew Brady photographs from the Civil War. It was a style that suited them.”
Back in Woodstock, he drove around looking for the right landscape and couldn’t find it – until he was hanging out in the living room of the house that Helm and Danko were sharing and looked out the window. There it was: a bare field backed by a mountain. Although Landy usually just allowed things to happen, in this case he provided some instructions. “In the 1860s the camera was unusual, and everyone paid attention when they were photographed and posed very formally. I said to them, ‘Stand up straight, face the camera and honor the fact you’re being photographed.’ I set my exposure for a very slow shutter speed,” and the famous shot that graced the album cover was accomplished.
One day Landy got a call from a freelance journalist that Bob Dylan, who also lived in Woodstock, needed a photograph for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. (Dylan’s privilege in providing the photograph to the magazine was evidence of his “unusual control,” according to Landy.) Landy, who was still living in the City, “drove up to Woodstock, got very friendly with Bob, went back to the City, developed the pictures, came back the next week and went over them with him. I did maybe two or three shoots. He’d say, ‘Take some pictures of me and my family.’” They were in black-and-white, which Landy preferred: “I only use color when the color itself is important, because many times it distracts from the form,” he said.
However, color was required for the magazine cover. The familiar image of Dylan sitting on the bumper of his car with his guitar, backlit by vivid red foliage, was the result of Landy’s experiments with infrared film. “A year later Dylan called up and said he just got back from Nashville, and could I come over so he could play me his album. He had an acetate of the Nashville skyline, which he planned to use on the front of the album. He needed a pic for the back.” Landy did the shoot, and when the two viewed the results, the acetate skyline idea was discarded.
Landy and the musicians always chose the images, which he said was a factor in their success. “It was me and the Band and me and Dylan who decided on the good ones,” he said. “Most times, the commercial interests don’t choose the best ones.”
His photos were helping attract attention to Woodstock, and one of the people who started coming up was Michael Lang (Landy himself bought a house in the area in 1968, eventually moving up full-time). Lang asked him to photograph the festival that he was planning, and took him out to the site in Wallkill where it was initially planned. The deal was sealed “without even a handshake, “ Landy said.
He soon tired of photographing rock musicians. “I got into some battles with Capital Records and didn’t like the business aspect. No one cared about me personally. The labels didn’t care, and were using my pictures without permission and not returning them. One time I found myself thinking about what the art director wanted while I was taking the picture. A second time I was thinking about how to sell the photo. Those two things disconnected me from the reason I photograph, which is to show a loving experience. I couldn’t deal with it, because photography is a very pure thing. It was never about earning money.”
He opened a gallery in Woodstock, which became a spiritual bookstore after he discovered “spiritual metaphysical books,” and started living with a woman. “When my wife had a baby, I found my inspiration again. For the next eight years I photographed the mother and child.”
Eager to get out of the US, especially after Nixon was elected, Landy and his wife went to Europe, arriving in Paris with $22 and a year-old infant. He’d been doing Super 8 movies that were synched to an audio soundtrack, and thought that he’d be able to land a contract for his “video records.” But he was ahead of his time. For the next seven years the family, which soon included a second child, bounced around Europe, hitchhiking, scraping by with sales of Landy’s photographs and living for a time in a bus with the 44 seats removed. “It was the most magical time of my life,” Landy recalled. The European media became enchanted by this American hippie photographer traveling with his family in a bus, which helped with sales.
But money was always tight, the children needed to go to school and after a while “my wife couldn’t do it anymore,” so they returned to Woodstock, where Landy took local pictures published in the Woodstock Times and eventually rustled up some interest in his ‘60s work after contacting foreign photo agencies.
Throughout all the changes, he never departed from his basic philosophy: to do what he loved. “I don’t do jobs and I don’t pursue earning money. Generally I only photograph when I’m inspired,” he said. Invisible benevolent forces have played a role in shaping his path through life, he suggested. “Dylan’s name is an anagram of my name. Linda’s name – which was originally spelled Lynda when she was born, before her mother changed it to the conventional spelling – is also an anagram of my name. I like the cosmic connection of it.”
