Deeper Digs: Contacting The Band with Elliot Landy
The Rock N Roll Archaeologist goes long and deep with famous Woodstock photographer, Elliott Landy on his time with The Band, a little on shooting Bob Dylan for the ‘Nashville Skyline’ cover and Van Morrison’s ‘Moondance’ cover. Elliott has a new crowd-source project through Kickstarter he is hoping to get off the ground. The new book will be called ‘Contacting the Band’, a follow up to his 2016 book, ‘The Band’ 1968-1969 about his two years working with the Americana godfathers.
Elliott Landy’s new book, Contacting The Band, will feature selected contact sheets of the photos I took of THE BAND in the late Sixties for their first two albums, Music From Big Pink and The Band. It will allow fans of THE BAND a unique, behind-the-scenes look at the process and frame by frame progression of these landmark photo shoots, including personal sessions with the guys at home and on the road.
It will be the companion to my previous book, The Band Photographs, 1968-1969, published in 2015 with the support of a Kickstarter campaign. which became its highest funded photography book at that time. It will be the same size (12 x 12 inches) with the same high quality printing and heavyweight paper, and will fit beautifully alongside the first volume on your bookshelf or coffee table.
Contact Sheets are photographic prints made from all the photos in a single roll of black and white film. The 35mm film I used had 36 photos in each roll. After developing, the film was cut into strips of 6 frames and placed on top of a sheet of 8x10 inch photographic paper with heavy glass on top to keep them flat. Once exposed to light, an image was created of each frame along with the film's sprocket holes and frame numbers. Since the photos were too small to see clearly, photographers used special magnifying glasses to mark the frames they thought were the best. Today that selection process is done on a computer screen.
Elliott Landy, born in 1942, began photographing the anti-Vietnam war movement and the underground music culture in New York City in 1967. He photographed many of the underground rock and roll superstars, both backstage and onstage, from 1967 to 69.
His images of Bob Dylan and The Band, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Joan Baez, Van Morrison, Richie Havens, and many others documented the music scene during that classic rock and roll period which culminated with the 1969 Woodstock Festival, of which he was the official photographer.
After that, Elliott moved on to other inspirations and art forms, photographing his own children and travels, creating impressionist flower photographs and doing motion and kaleidoscopic photography in both still and film formats.
His photographs have been published worldwide for many years in all print mediums including covers of Rolling Stone, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, etc. and album covers, calendars, photographic book collections, etc.
He has published Woodstock Vision, The Spirit of A Generation, in book and CD-ROM format, and authored the book Woodstock 69, The First Festival.
He is currently publishing a series of limited edition lithographs of his classic rock photographs.
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