Inside Elliott Landy’s Iconic Photos of the Band

One night in 1968 in New York City, when Elliott Landy was photographing a performance by Janis Joplin with her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, he felt a tap on his back. It was their manager Albert Grossman, who also repped Bob Dylan. “He brought me into a large utility closet where we could talk, and closed the door,” says Landy, 83. “He said to me, ‘What are you doing next weekend? We have this new group that we want pictures of.’ I said, ‘What’s their name?’ And he said, ‘They don’t have a name yet.’”

Formerly known as the Hawks, the group of mostly Canadian musicians he was talking about — guitarist Robbie Robertson, vocalist-drummer Levon Helm, organist Garth Hudson, singer-bassist Rick Danko, and singer-keyboardist Richard Manuel — had previously backed Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan, and were finally breaking out on their own. Soon, the world would know them simply as the Band. Landy went along for the ride, photographing them from 1968 to 1969 and capturing over 10,000 images. Those are compiled together in the new The Band Photographs, 1968–1969, a stunning two-volume collection (the first volume was published in 2015). Landy went through key images with us over Zoom, from his home in Woodstock, New York. “These are five brothers who came together and brought so much perpetuity and happiness,” he says. “You hear that music, it just wakes you up.”