In Elliott Landy’s studio, there was a box he’d labeled “seconds.” Inside were the photographs that didn’t make it into his first book on The Band. Years after that 2015 volume was published, Landy opened the box, started flipping through the eight-by-ten work prints, and felt a shock of recognition. How did I leave that out? One image after another—favorites, forgotten. “At that point,” he says, “I knew I had to do a second book.”
The result is The Band Photographs 1968–1969, a handsome new two-volume set that gathers, for the first time, what amounts to a visual encyclopedia of those short, incandescent years when Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson were inventing a new language of American music in and around Woodstock—and letting one quiet photographer into the room. Much of Volume 2 has never been seen before; Landy figures roughly two-thirds of the pictures in the new book were either newly scanned negatives or images that had only ever surfaced in passing.
Landy came to The Band by fate and by way of Janis Joplin. Photographing Big Brother and the Holding Company in New York led to an introduction to their manager, Albert Grossman, who also looked after Bob Dylan and a nameless group of Canadians and one Arkansan then cutting tracks for Music from Big Pink. Grossman summoned Landy to a dingy club, asked if he was free the following weekend, and told him, “We have this band that needs pictures. They don’t have a name yet.” Soon after, Landy walked into a Manhattan mixing room and heard, for the first time, the seismic organ blast that opens “Chest Fever.” That was his introduction to The Band.
What followed is now lore. Landy became the only photographer with true access to the group during the making of their first two albums, embedding himself at Big Pink, in rented houses near Woodstock, and later in the Hollywood Hills pool house where The Band—“the Brown album”—was recorded. He was present for the daily stuff: checkers, football, family dinners, new babies, stray dogs, pawnshop instruments, and the quiet time between takes. The resulting archive—more than 10,000 images—helped define not only how the group looked but how their music was seen. Critics and musicians talk about The Band as the seedbed of what we now call Americana; Landy’s photographs are the visual half of that DNA.
He’s characteristically modest about it. “I didn’t want to change what they were,” he says. “I didn’t want to be their friend, have them laugh at my jokes. I wanted them to do whatever they wanted to do, and I wanted to capture it.” The secret, if there is one, is extreme presence paired with studied humility. Landy composes obsessively in the viewfinder—so much so that he often doesn’t remember what was said while he was shooting—but he refuses to perform for his subjects or coax them into performing for him. No jumping, no antics, no “one more big smile.” He stands back, fades out, and waits for the frame to feel right.
That quiet rigor extends to the books themselves. When Landy self-published the first Band volume through Kickstarter, he tested printers on two continents and mocked up sample pages in multiple sizes, laying them across his lap to see how they felt. He arrived at a 12-by-12–inch square, only later realizing he’d reinvented the dimensions of an LP jacket. For the new two-volume edition, designed with collaborator Caitlin Allyson, he wanted each page to be “looking at photographs, not looking at a book”—one image per spread whenever possible, pairs of pictures chosen because they feel like they belong together, not because a designer needed to fill a grid.
When his new publisher proposed splitting the project into a slipcased set, Landy hesitated. “I really wasn’t quite sure it was the right thing to do,” he admits. “Now that it’s done, it’s the most obvious thing in the world.” Each volume carries a different weight: the first, the canon; the second, the revelation. Together, they form what he calls “a complete for-the-moment set” of his Band photographs—“and it’s there forever like that.”
Why do these pictures, and this band, continue to pull people in strongly enough to power record-setting crowdfunding campaigns half a century later? Landy goes back to who they were as human beings. He talks about their “brothership”—their embodiment of creativity, connection, and collaboration. He remembers them treating the counterman from the local deli with the same easy respect they’d show a label executive. He didn’t see them argue in those years. The music carries that warmth; the photos do, too.
Landy is best known for Dylan, The Band, and the Woodstock festival, but he’s really spent a lifetime trying to photograph a feeling rather than a celebrity: the unguarded moment when someone forgets there’s a camera in the room and simply exists. In his work with The Band, that feeling happens to intersect with a pivotal moment in American music history. It’s all there in the faces: Robrtson’s intensity, Helm’s wry Southern watchfulness, Danko’s jollity and ache, Manuel’s shy mischief, Hudson’s interior, sideways gaze.
On Thursday, November 20 at 7pm, at Upstate Films’ Orpheum Theater in Saugerties, Landy will walk through that history in person. “An Evening with Elliott Landy” is billed as a guided tour of his career, with images of Dylan, The Band, and Woodstock’s original muddy miracle on the big screen. The presentation will be followed by a reception at Rohmer Gallery, 84 Partition Street, where Landy’s latest photographs are on exhibit.
For anyone who still gets a chill when “Chest Fever” roars to life—or who’s ever stared at the Big Pink cover and wondered what it felt like to stand behind the lens that day—it’s a rare chance to see the man who quietly helped shape the way we remember all of it.
