Dan Garson's Woodstock Experience

In the summer of 1969, a seventeen year-old kid from New Haven wrote to the organizers of a proposed outdoor rock concert in upper New York State and asked if he could photograph their Festival for his high school newspaper ... a few weeks later Dan Garson received confirmation in the mail of his press credentials to Woodstock.

Dan Garson’s Woodstock Experience is a "digital coffee table book” designed for exclusive use on the iPad, featuring over 200 previously unseen photographs and related ephemera from the seminal event which defined a generation.

With an introduction written by Woodstock co-producer Michael Lang, and the story behind the historic collection written by noted American journalist Rona Elliot - who has also provided her thoughts and descriptions to over five dozen images in the interactive Gallery - Dan Garson's Woodstock Experience is an App which details one young man's trip to the concert that changed everything.

For decades, Dan Garson’s slides and negatives from Woodstock sat in a cardboard box in his parents New England basement. Along with his photographs, Dan’s typed manuscript, pages of handwritten notes and related ephemera were discovered and have been included with this application. All of the images and related materials have been scanned, restored, and "packaged" for Apple's iPad, whose backlit LCD screen provides a truly remarkable viewing experience.

The user of this application is able to “pinch and zoom” on the photographs and ephemera while listening to voice-overs of the related chapters. Images from the Gallery can be e-mailed to friends and the user is able to program their own slideshow from the Dan Garson Woodstock collection while listening to music from their iTunes library ... and it is only available for the iPad. Buy the App. Take the trip.

*****

Dan Garson's Woodstock photographs are "some of the freshest and most interesting images I have ever seen of that weekend in the mountains" ...

Michael Lang
Catskills, 2011

*****

"As someone who worked at Woodstock and who has seen literally thousands of Woodstock pictures, I see Dan Garson's photographs as amazing and insightful for that time, and in hindsight, nothing short of totally astonishing. They display a clarity both of subject matter and contextual view. They resonate. I look at his beautiful photos and I am back at the Festival site, mud and heat and smell" ...

Rona Elliot
Los Angeles, 2011

*****