Nowadays, music festivals are frequented by flower-crown wearing hipsters desperate to imitate the free love and airy attitude we’ve come to associate with camping out to listen to your favourite bands.

That attitude has its origins at a festival that happened 50 years ago, this week, on a farm in Bethel, New York, which quickly became the stuff of legends.

Woodstock is one of the things that your parents told you about. It’s a piece of cultural history that everyone just seems to be familiar with. That’s because it is, in many ways, the OG festival.

It’s the template that all subsequent festivals have tried to shove themselves into.

This year, Woodstock was set to celebrate half a century since that first acid-fuelled event, but the festival was cancelled.

There’s another way to get that nostalgia kick, though.

Some recently unearthed images taken by photojournalist Richard F. Bellak, who died in 2015, capture a never before seen side of Woodstock.

Over to CNN:

Bellak was, according to Kane, one of just a handful of “professional-level” photographers to have captured the event. He appears to have overlooked the festival’s performers (which famously included Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane and The Who), and instead turned his lens on attendees.

As a result, his images show attendees hanging out, watching bands and preparing camps, while documenting the deterioration of the muddy site over the course of five days. Bellak also took a series of rare nighttime images, which were especially difficult to capture using cameras from the time.

His photos give us a raw but endearing look at the people who attended the event.

Enjoy:

All those people having a great time, and not a single influencer in sight.

Peace and love, man.

[source:cnn]