Time Machine goes to 1969 this week — the year of Woodstock. Last summer, Mary Lucia talked to photographer Burk Uzzle, the person who captured the iconic image that graces the cover of the Woodstock album.

Burk Uzzle has enjoyed a decades-long career as a photojournalist, where his work including photography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and documenting the Civil Rights movement. Uzzle now lives in Wilson, N.C., where he primarily works in art photography with strong anti-racist themes.

The Woodstock photo, which captured Bobbi Kelly and Nick Ercoline — who have now been married since 1971 — as they embraced at dawn on a hillside at Max Yasgur's dairy farm, the site of the Woodstock music festival, may be Uzzle's most well-known work. But it's not the experience he cherishes the most, as he told Lucia last summer. Listen to the audio above, or view the video and transcript below.

Video Transcript

Burk, tell me how you — actually, I should ask: You were hired to photograph Woodstock?

No. No, no, no. I'll tell you about Woodstock. My wife, Cardy, and my two boys, Tad and Andy, who were very young, we were living in New York, and we heard about Woodstock, we'd just go up and hear some tunes.

So when things like that are happening, like Martin Luther King and so forth, I never take assignments. Editors think they know everything; they don't know sh*t! You know, editors just - they're not there. So what you do is see what you think you should see, and you photograph what's important, and it always changes anyway. Woodstock changed terrifically. We got in, we pitched our tent, and then Woodstock became Woodstock. So no, I didn't take an assignment; I went there on my own.

And then, of course, my wife and kids and I were photographing living in a lean-to that was made on a barbed-wire fence, and then, you know, I go look around, and there they were; that was the cover picture. And I saw those people taking their clothes off up by the lake, and I said, "Well! Wow!" So I went down to the stage where the photographers were on assignments, you know, stupidly, doing what the editors told them to do, which was to stay on the stage, and I borrowed film from them. So I went back up to where the people were taking their clothes off, and I took pictures, and the cover of "Woodstock."

And you realized quickly that Woodstock really, what started as a music festival, the music almost seemed secondary to the people.

Well, indeed, and that's why my picture of the Ercolines hugging each other, you know, after it was all said and done, they realized that American culture — hey, there were people, hippies, it was hippie heaven with these people doing drugs and this stuff, they were taking care of each other, so there they were. The people became the story, and so they decided, well, they would put that picture on the cover. It was a people story.

But the Woodstock cover has become one of the most recognizable pictures in the whole history of photography, and when I die, you know, they'll do this little thing, "Well, he's the guy that took the picture on the 'Woodstock' album." Well, that's fine with me, it's a lovely photograph, you know, I did it well, and it's there for all the world to see. And that's fine by me. I love that idea.

You know, it's about communication. You know, we take pictures because we want to give people what we feel, and what we feel is important to see. They have to feel it, too. Otherwise, why bother? Why would I want to take pictures if I wasn't going to let other people try to feel what I felt?

A great photographer, he was working at Life, John Mealy, said, "You have to look at something that speaks to you."

And we will link to the documentary as well as, I mean, all your work; one just need Google your name, and I really doubt that people would only associate you with that Woodstock photograph, which is fantastic, and it's all of that, but some of those images, just of the ordinary people, unknown, it, like you said, it's a communication starter, and people come to the exhibit and they know people in the photograph and they start talking to one another as neighbors, and that's so significant to me.

To that point, and thank you so much for mentioning that. I was given a commission by a little North Carolina museum in Greenville, North Carolina, and they gave me a commission to photograph contemporary Black people, all kinds of people: people that have been in jail, people that had lived homeless and some still are homeless, and people that have made a lot of money, and good artists, all kinds of people, and we will do an exhibition only of Black people. I'm not sure a museum had ever done that before. And this little museum in Greenville, North Carolina, did that. And let me tell you: It broke all the attendance records. And the people that came, all the Black families came, and they brought everybody they knew, and that can be quite a list; it's a community. And they came, they came as groups and big families, and they stood there, and they looked, and they cried, they cried with joy that they were seeing each other life size! Now, that is a thrill. That is one of the great experiences of my whole life.

Revisit Mary Lucia's complete 2020 interview with Burk Uzzle

External Links

Burk Uzzle - official site

F11 and Be There - Burk Uzzle documentary by Jethro Waters, official site

Gallery

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