Anders Holmquist

This book is a collaboration between writer/poet Peter Marin and the photographer/vexillographer Anders Holmquist, but there is no integration between the two, anymore than two sections in a magazine reference each other. They are both separate entities here: an eight page essay at the beginning, followed by a gallery of over one hundred and fifty black & white photographs.

Peter Marin's essay on 'the young' gave pause for thought. I have read it twice. I will read it again.

Anders Holmquist's insistence, on the other hand, of letting the photographs speak for themselves, can leave you with a sense of isolation.
As much as they are an amazing record of the era, without any further written record, they lack the geographic context that would have provided far greater understanding of the events that were taking place at the time.
Otherwise, you just have: people in a record shop, a hair salon, couple on a beach, horticultural land use, a health food store... etc.

The back cover explains:
'Much has been made of the Woodstock Music Festival. This is not a book about that festival; it is a book about the people who went there.'
There are about 30 images of the festival itself, but from the attention given to Janis Joplin alone, I suspect all these photographs were probably taken on the same day (16 August 1969). The only other clue to dating the photographs in the book are the queues outside the Fillmore West for: Santana, Seatrain, Yusef Lateef. Which would place it around September 4 - 7 1969. But these images are not shown in chronological order.
I suspect that Anders Holmquist (like many people) wished he had taken more film with him to Woodstock, and the photographs taken over the following month are his attempt to capture the mood of the 'Summer of Love' - which was by that time creeping into autumn and would soon be gone forever.

I feel that I've had to knock off half a star due to the lack of any photo index. It's not as if space was an issue - I mean, the author dedicated over half a page to providing the most detailed lithography information I have yet come across. Including paper type, weight, colour. Full typographical details of all the fonts including their origin story going back to 1620. Don't get me wrong, I love typeface probably more than most people do, but what I wanted here was information pertaining to where and when the photographs were taken more than anything else.

Otherwise, this book is a treasure.… (mehr)