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GREENSBORO — America is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock festival in ways large and small this summer, from major motion pictures to mass-produced, vintage-style T-shirts.

But in Greensboro, one celebration of the great music festival is taking place in a strange venue: UNCG’s Jackson Library.

“They’re 20 pictures from the Woodstock festival taken by Arnold Doren, who taught in our art department,” said Betty Carter, university archivist.

“They show just every aspect of the festival — people’s faces and feet, the sheer size of this whole monster crowd, some hippie kids showering, and Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar,” Carter said.

Doren was an award winning photographer who taught his craft at UNCG from 1978 until a year before he died in 2003.

In 1969, Doren — then in his mid-thirties — may not have fully grasped the cultural significance when he headed to the free music festival at Max Yasgur’s 600-acre farm in Bethel, N.Y. But his camera captured it.

Doren shot 10 rolls of film at the three-day festival and captured the art, fashion and communal spirit of the event where bands such as The Who, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young brought together a generation of music fans.

The photos are part of a collection of 70 boxes Doren left to the school — the largest gift of photos in the school’s history.

Ranging from the 1960s into the new century, the collection includes meticulously catalogued prints, digital photos, Polaroids, negatives and slides of moments in history that the photographer captured on several continents.

Doren was a favorite professor for generations of art students at UNCG.

Carter said his gift to the library will likely inspire more on-campus photo exhibits and could be invaluable to students of history.

“As a photographer, he was an artist,” Carter said of Doren, who studied at the Rochester Institute of technology under photographer Minor White. “But I feel like he was also a bit of a historian, a journalist; he was really all of it in a way.”

Contact Joe Killian at 373-7023 or joe.killian@news-record.com