BOOK: “The Band Photographs: 1968-1969”
I love big, beautiful books. Every coffee table I’ve ever purchased has been big enough to house the big, beautiful books I’ve collected over the years: a book of haunting landscape photos from my native Alberta, our wedding scrapbook, another one about chair design.
Elliot Landy’s The Band Photographs: 1968-1969 is one of those books that I would definitely make room for on my coffee table (sorry, hubby — the wedding scrapbook is going into storage for now!)
This book is breathtaking in style and subject matter. Even if you aren’t a fan of the Band and their music, you can still appreciate the warmth and depth of each photograph. Elliot Landy was their official photographer for Music from Big Pink and The Band, and he’d developed such a rapport with the group that he was essentially invisible during his time with them, able to act as a “guitar pick on the wall” during key recording sessions in Woodstock and the downtime in between. That intimacy is strikingly apparent in the photos presented in this volume and makes the images captured feel both immediate and legendary, somehow, at the same time.
Most of the photos are shown in monochrome but a number of them are vibrantly full color. It is to Landy’s credit as a photographer that nearly every single page of this book contains a photo that could stand on its own as an art print, hanging on a wall somewhere. This was an era of huge change in the music industry, and with it grew the brand new field of rock photography. Elliot Landy is simply one of the best.
Interspersed between the chapters that divvy up the 200-some photos in the book are short essays and remembrances about the Band. These provide colorful commentary on the subject of each photo: stories about the first time he may have met Bob Dylan, or about sleeping arrangements at Big Pink, or of the first time he saw them live. Landy writes that he’s in his 70s but feels like he’s in his 20s, and that comes through in his writing. It’s as if by writing these stories and picking through contact sheets for photos to go along with them, he’s actually living it all over again.
As a work of pure photographic art, this book is guaranteed to awe. If you’re a fan of The Band — or of Elliot Landy — it’s a must-have. If you’re keen on Americana and that fabled time in music history, you can’t go wrong.
And if you’re like me and love big, beautiful books, it doesn’t get much bigger or more beautiful than this.
Get your copy of Elliot Landy’s The Band Photographs: 1968-1969 on Amazon.
(Cover photo via Elliot Landy)
