Do you remember watching any shows?

Oh, yeah, Janis Joplin. I remember most of them. The sound wasn’t amazing, and there was also a lot of crowds. It was hard to get around. There were no pathways where people were supposed to walk, so everybody was huddled around. To get food or go to the toilet, you had to walk over people. That was one thing that stuck in my mind. The other was there was a funny, awful smell in the mud. I don’t know what it was from, if it was fertilizer or a sewage problem or something. I remember people were passing around pills that they were saying was acid. There were pink ones and green ones. I thought to myself, it’s stupid to take something that you have no idea what’s in these. It could be arsenic for all I know.

What was it like photographing in a time when not everybody was doing it?

A person carrying a camera like that, a Nikon — you had to know something about what you were doing. It wasn’t something you could just pick up. Also, I was using film. It was black and white, so you had to process it and you had to know something about the speed of film and lighting. If you were more amateurish, you might buy a small Kodak camera that had a flash in it or take some Polaroid pictures. I was a stranger in that environment, but people were more comfortable being photographed, maybe because they were part of an event, and maybe felt they were making some sort of historical statement.