When photographer Daniel Kramer first met Bob Dylan, the 23-year-old singer was still widely unknown. At their initial meeting in Woodstock, Dylan seemed restless and uncomfortable in front of the camera. Yet over the course of a year and a day, all of that would change. From 1964 to 1965, Kramer’s extraordinary access to Bob Dylan on tour, in concert, and backstage, allowed for one of the most mesmerizing portfolios of any recording artist and a stunning document of Dylan breaking through to superstardom.
Highlights include the Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall concert with Joan Baez; the Bringing It All Back Home recording sessions; and the now famous concert at Forest Hills, when Dylan’s controversial transition to electric guitar exemplified his constant, cryptic state of becoming. As much a document of a seminal period of rock-n-roll history as of Dylan himself, the pictures also feature such compelling friends and collaborators as Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Allen Ginsberg, and Albert Grossman.
When first published in 1967, with the encouragement of W. Eugene Smith, Kramer’s Dylan portfolio became an instant classic. Now, a half-century later, TASCHEN rediscovers this body of work with a curated selection of near 200 images, many never published before, including outtakes from the Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited album cover shoots. A prized edition for any serious Dylan fan, this is an at once intimate and infinitely evocative testimony to a seminal photographer, to a particular point in time, and to a particular, mysterious artist at the moment his career went global.
Collector’s Edition limited to 1,765 numbered copies, each signed by Daniel Kramer, letterpress-printed chapter openers with tipped-in photographs, two different paper stocks, and three foldouts
Also available as two Art Editions of 100 copies (No. 1–100 and No. 101–200), each signed by Daniel Kramer and with a signed and numbered gelatin silver print.
The photographer
Daniel Kramer is a photographer and filmmaker whose portraits and picture stories have been published worldwide; his film work encompasses documentaries and commercials. But it is his photographs of Bob Dylan, the first major work published about the young artist on his way from superstar to icon during 1964 and 1965, which catapulted Kramer’s work onto the international stage. A master printer, Kramer’s photographs are widely collected and exhibited. Brooklyn born, he lives in New York City with his wife and collaborator Arline Cunningham Kramer.