On August 17th, 1969, this music festival was going to go down in history. It was Woodstock. One one of the many photographers on hand that day sent us these photographs and memories.
“Actually, we went to the Catskills to go fishing and hear a little music.
Cardy, Tad , Andy and I went camping at a mountain stream near the festival, and decided to drive into the Music Festival on the first day to check it out. Took a small bag of crackers and snacks, a poncho in case it rained, and a pocket full of B&W film.
As always, had along my two Leicas.The crowd was already immense, but arriving early we got in, and parked. Shortly after that the New York State Throughway had to be shut down.It was quickly apparent that ticket sales, security, food services, sanitation, and any resemblance to a normal, traditional sense of how society usually works could not be found.
This vast population was on it’s own to create, in the rain and mud with great music and a karma of good will, a new world. We coped. We were gentle. We looked out for each other. We shared. We were miserable. We were happy. We were together.
It was hot. It was rainy. It was very crowded and crazy with excitement. It was wonderful!
We were stuck there. Could not leave. We made a lean-to using the poncho and a
barbwire fence on a hillside. That became home. Cardy rationed out the snacks to Tad and Andy, ages nine and ten.
I rationed out my pocketful of B&W film to my Leicas. That became more and more difficult, especially after I wandered out of the stage-front crowd and found the lake and surrounding areas had become small villages where folks were sleeping in abandoned farm sheds, around haystacks, and in the open. And often without any clothes. I immediately lost interest in photographing musicians with their clothes on.
Making trips back to the front of the stage I borrowed film from my photographer friends who were on magazine assignments to photograph the stage activities, while telling them of this amazing new world happening around the lake.
They all felt obligated to be responsible to their editor’s instructions and photograph the musicians. Happily, my Magnum Photographer friend, Charlie Harbutt, also generously loaned me some rolls of color.
One of the Leicas was then converted to color, and that enabled the Woodstock Album Cover.
Actually, what really produced the Woodstock Album Cover is that our American Culture, tormented with the war and profound social upheavals of the sixties, spun on a dime during that Woodstock festival of 1969.
Within all that mud and misery was a profound beauty as people did the right things to get along, to help each other. A social poetry was on those days evident.
The Ercoline’s, with their tender and eloquent hug within a tattered blanket, in a first-dawn light, photographed with a Leica and normal lens with film borrowed from a close friend, provided the symbol for an event that helped us all understand what is possible if we just try.”
Burk Uzzle’s career, like his pictures, is a nuanced composition blending American culture, individual psyches of particular places or people, and an atypical way of seeing ourselves, our values, and our community. Always respectful yet locating the poignant or quirky, the history of his narrative belongs to all of us. Initially grounded in documentary photography when he was the youngest photographer ever hired by LIFE magazine at age 23, his work then grew into a combination of split-second impressions reflecting the human condition during his tenure as a member of the prestigious international Magnum cooperative founded by one of his mentors Henri Cartier-Bresson. For fifteen years, Uzzle was an active contributor to the evolution of the organization and served as its President in 1979 and 1980. During the sixteen years he was associated with Magnum, he produced some of the most recognizable images we have of Woodstock (album cover and worldwide reproduction of its iconic couple hugging at dawn) to the assassination and funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. to our comprehension for the experience of Cambodian war refugees.
His archive spans almost six decades. His current work rests deep in photographic appreciation of the quiet, strong, and eloquent beauty he discovers in America’s small towns and its people. Uzzle’s current body of work is the production of artful and constructed reflections of his subjects, many of whom are African-American residents proximal to his studio in North Carolina. Their layers of experience are conjoined with Uzzle’s fundamental appreciation for unseen characteristics, which he ably captures in a collaborative, interpretive context along with his eye and his heart. interpretation, of art, of independently produced projects.
All those small roads, lined with feelings and a surety of surprise for the heart wide open, help me understand how America keeps it’s personality out on a limb with itself. Born a Southerner with an affection and curiosity for every inch of all of America, my continuing journey has also enlarged itself within my studio.
Amazing and huge, my two adjoining buildings hold a century of uses and lives, their walls speaking of the passage and mystery of time. Offering not so much a specific narrative, but a monument to the power of the vague, these walls invite the imagination to find what it needs right there in front of it’s eyes.
Their poetry of imperfection stand as an invitation to think of the nature of existence, and as an environment for photographing people, live, within a visual suggestion of an archaeological “dig.” Here these people are, representatives of now, with no particular logic relating to these walls of time, with their individual transcendence offering history a look at contemporary life. On the road, between the walls, my hope is for a graphic presentation of something universal within the particular, and all the better when involving a gentle chuckle and knowing smile.
Burk Uzzle, (c) 2014
Reprinted with permission, copyright South x Southeast photomagazine, sxsemagazine.com
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