The heady bliss of Glastonbury Festival after the music

There’s only a few hours of quiet at Glastonbury Festival. At 6am, the giant soundsystems of the Southeast Corner turn off, and people begin ferrying away along the old railroad under the early morning sun. Many make their ways back to their tents, while some scour the site for a bite to eat. Others want to keep the party going and march arm-in-arm up the hill to the Stone Circle.

Glasto is a different energy in the morning. Most of the festival sleeps, and the sensory overload of over 100 stages going at once, thousands-strong crowds and people endlessly weaving through each other, takes a pause. There’s an almost freeing emptiness, which photographer Mischa Haller set out to capture at the festival’s 2024 edition.

“You do whatever comes to mind,” Haller says. ​“It’s almost like when the programme stops, you get into the flow of things and see where it takes you – there’s this kind of free-flowing atmosphere, where you meet people, maybe bump into somebody and have a new encounter. That’s what I wanted to cover.”

• Read next: In photos: Three decades of Glastonbury Festival’s people and subcultures

His new book, Not Done Yet, is a visual journey through the festival’s wee hours, collating photographs Haller made across the festival’s five mornings, and in various far-flung reaches of the site, from the aforementioned Stone Circle where a fire burns the whole weekend, to the iconic Glastonbury sign at The Park, to food stands still operating in the small hours.

“I went to bed every evening at like 8pm, 8:30pm, then got up and 3am and started working at 4am,” he explains of his process. ​“I’d see a group of people and think they looked great, then I’d go over to talk to them and say, ​‘Don’t pay any attention to me, just do whatever you do.’ That’s when the photos evolve and some beautiful accidents happen.” 

The pictures capture the euphoric morning bliss of Glastonbury at sunrise, as people debrief from the night before and search for new adventures. There’s people wondering around in elaborate get-ups and huge hats, while others traverse the site cleanup crew who only have a few hours to pick up as much litter as possible before the madness restarts for another day.

• Read next: The British intimacy of ​‘the afters’

Not Done Yet is an extension of Haller’s landmark series Not Going Home, which saw him travel to nightclubs during the ​’90s just as they were shutting and photograph partygoers as they wound down in various states of afters. Now, decades later, within the confines of the UK’s biggest festival and its most important annual cultural event, there’s much of the same spirit captured as the original series, but also differences.

The front cover shot features a man trying to work his phone, while his friend – dressed in a high vis jacket and a matching neon balaclava – pulls a pose. ​“He was trying to contact a friend, but then they also saw me [taking photographs] so they started doing really funny poses,” Haller says. ​“It’s now almost 30 years after the first book was shot, and now a phone is on the cover. The phone is everywhere – we’re living in a world of phones, so I thought it was fitting to where we are now.”

Yet as the photographs in both Not Going Home and now Not Done Yet show, people are different when they’ve been out all night. That energy spans across generations, when folks are at their loosest and the pressures of daily life are distant. ​“It’s this in between moment that I’m looking for,” he continues. ​“People are a bit more open, a bit more honest – they let go and they’re having a good time. I like to show the humanity of us as people having a good time, and at 4am or 5am I feel like people are less controlling, less held back, and closer to who we really are deep down.”

Not Done Yet by Mischa Haller is published by In Between Press.

Isaac Muk is Huck’s digital editor. Follow him on Bluesky.

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