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Burk Uzzle talks about how a simple embrace came to represent Woodstock’s “three days of peace and music.''

According to anyone who was there (or says they were there), the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was more than just a rain-soaked, three-day festival in upstate New York. Alongside the Vietnam War and the Apollo Moon landing, Woodstock's "three days of peace and music" remains a vital cultural touchstone for the boomer generation.

For the rest of us, Burk Uzzle's photographs of Nick and Bobbi Ercoline – just one more happy couple amid the throng of free lovers – have shown us how it felt to be there. The mud, the exhaustion, the sense of revolution in the air – all of it is captured in the modest exchange between these two hippie kids. Small wonder why one of the shots made up the cover of the two-LP "Woodstock" soundtrack.

Uzzle, then in his early thirties, had been assigned by "Newsweek" to cover the event, but declined the assignment.

"I wanted to go to Woodstock to go to Woodstock," Uzzle said. "So I took my wife and two young sons and we walked around the whole time. I stayed sober, too. I was probably the one person there who could see ten feet in front of him."

Uzzle said that, while other photographers crowded the stage, his freedom from formal subjects and deadlines enabled him to capture what was going on amid the festival's attendees.

"It unfolded very quickly," he said. "The first day, all these people started taking their clothes off, so I went down to the stage and told my photographer friends, ‘Hey, you need to leave the stage because all these wonderful things are happening up here.' And they said, ‘No, I've got to stay and get this shot of [Jimi] Hendrix.' So I said, "Fine, if that's the case, loan me some film.' Consequently, I'm one of just a handful of guys who got all the space."

Uzzle said his world famous shot of Nick and Bobbie Ercoline (who remain married to this day) occurred during the Jefferson Airplane's historic afternoon performance.

"I was walking by and, as this one couple stood up and hugged, I took a couple of pictures," he said. "It lasted just a couple of seconds. I didn't even get the names of those kids, but about twenty years later I heard they threw away the blanket because it was pretty much disintegrated."

This is the fifth in our "Our Defining Moments" series, an ongoing ReZoom.com People feature looking back on the moments that, through the power of photography, have been emblazoned into our collective consciousness. To see the previous "Our Defining Moments," click here.