The big picture: the highs of Woodstock

Throughout the Woodstock music festival, which celebrates its 50th anniversary later this month, concert-goers scaled 70ft sound towers to get a better look at what was happening on stage. Depending on your view, this was either “insanely dangerous”, as production coordinator John Morris described it in Woodstock: An Oral History – the towers weren’t set up to hold all that extra weight and one fallen structure could have killed “hundreds of people” – or an expression of the joyful sense of freedom that pervaded the four-day event in August 1969.

For photographer Elliott Landy, who captured the climbers during his in-depth coverage of Woodstock, the ascent of the sound towers, though dangerous, has a broader meaning. “It really symbolises the nature of the 60s,” he says, “which was that people were trying to get higher, spiritually, so they can experience life in a better way, in a clearer way.”

Landy, who lived in the town of Woodstock (and still does), had been commissioned to document the festival on the strength of his recent photographs of the Band and Bob Dylan. He had no idea at the time how important the festival would turn out to be – “I don’t think anybody did,” he says – but has no doubt now of its cultural significance.

“It was a utopian moment in human culture,” he says. “It was a moment where we saw that half a million people could live together in harmony under very difficult conditions. Food and water were scarce, there was no place to get out of the rain, and it was muddy, so, physically, people were not comfortable. But spiritually and mentally, they were.”

As for the tower-climbers, though they were asked repeatedly to get down, ultimately nobody forced them off. “One of the reasons that Woodstock succeeded was that no one controlled it,” says Landy. “The police, the governor and the promoters of the festival all gave up control. They said: ‘There’s nothing we can do about this, all we can do is be helpful instead.’ What I would describe as a feminine energy permeated the festival – it supports, it listens, it is compassionate. It was freedom in the air.”