I’ve been working for NYUndressed now for nearly 3 years. Each article comes to me in different ways. For most, I get my content from an NYC based PR company. For a few I have solely generated content. This article is a combination of the two. It was neat because this content reached my inbox via an older contact but she has now switched companies yet remembered me from her previous job. Sometimes new content sits in my inbox for a few weeks as I am finishing up articles I had already started. Art Miami just stirred up a slew of content so I was focused on fixing up those posts and the request to hear Jerry Schatzberg speak about his experiences working with Bob Dylan sat until the event had nearly passed. I finally got around to opening it and was quite excited when I read a primary subject was Bob Dylan. Precisely a book titled, “Dylan,” a book of photographs and stories of Jerry Shatzberg’s time with the musician. It was too late for me to fly to NYC and hear Jerry speak but there was time to offer what I am publishing now. I am so perked by the name Bob Dylan because my love and father of my children is named after him – his name is Dylan. For the longest time I have pondered on Bob Dylan’s existence knowing in some way he significantly influenced the Dylan I know, even though we both grew up after Bob Dylan’s prime.
During Dylan’s prime he was ingested as a savior figure, and was constantly asked by the media to explain his expressions. The book, in part, captures his responses to such scrutiny. It celebrates in images the moment when Bob Dylan made music history by going electric with Blonde on Blonde. In it, you can read many entertaining anecdotes about working with the famously mysterious Dylan.
The book is an artful arrangement of dialogue between various personalities, including Schatzberg, photographs of Bob Dylan and quotations from his songs.
The book is one artist capturing another artist. It contains photographs from concerts, from Dylan’s studio, magazine covers, musical musings and more.
Manhattan, New York, USA 1965
Lethem writes of the photographs, “The most widely disseminated of these images are not just good photographs of an unusually interesting person who seems vibrantly responsive to your camera (even when he’s pretending it’s not there) – they’re cultural signal flares that told a generation ‘something’s happening here’ even if you ‘don’t know what it is (p.21).'”
In response Schatzberg writes, “I had been hearing about him but it was through the badgering of two friends of mine…I had heard a lot of personal music before…But the combination of honesty and art I found in Dylan’s work was something totally new to me (p.22).”
He is thriving alongside Andy Warhol. He owned a Warhol painting and made a snide remark about wanting to impale it. His lyric, “Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial,” makes one wonder if he is referring to the acceptance of various standards of artistic craftsmanship.
America’s experimentation with bisexuality starts happening during his career (as mentioned in reference to Schatzberg’s photograph of The Rolling Stones in drag). He undergoes a spiritual transformation (subconsciously or consciously included by the use of religious props). There are ideas everywhere pushing and pulling against Bob Dylan’s, which were often not of typical sensibility. To reconcile these forces he writes lyrics such as,
“I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
You’d know what a drag it is
To see you”
Lethem writes to Schatzberg, “Dylan’s transformations and provocations, and the invigorating demands they made on our culture, came at such a rapid clip in those months. And at the same time, his professed goal in his art is to ‘stop time.’ And that’s exactly what you managed to do (p.66),”
As the book comes to a close again the lyric,
“Something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?”
is accentuated, this time with preceding lyrics and its own page.
The book subtly reminds us to synchronize ourselves with how artists shape culture by being authentically assertive in who they are.
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Additional Details
In 1965, photographer Jerry Schatzberg, already well-established in the field due to his fashion and portrait photography for various publications, such as Vogue, Esquire and Life, listened to Bob Dylan for the first time. After a serendipitous meeting with famed music journalist Al Aronowitz, Schatzberg was given permission to photograph Dylan where he was currently recording Highway 61 Revisited. Excited and curious, Schatzberg set off the next day for the studio, exactly six days after the seminal Newport Folk Festival set where Dylan went electric and was collectively booed. Schatzberg received a warm welcome from the singer (which was rare considering Dylan’s almost-universal dislike of journalists), who immediately sat him down to listen to what he had been recording that day. Dylan gave him free rein of the studio once he started shooting and the images that emerged from that day make obvious the comfortable and relaxed atmosphere that was already brewing between photographer and subject.
Schatzberg’s indispensable images not only stand the test of time. Part of their unique quality is their broad range of intimate and public locations: music and photography studios, live performances and street portraits. But more than that, each session says something different about Dylan, the man and the musician, and manages to perfectly capture the many facets of one of the most complex and mysterious individuals of all time.
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I recommend this book for anyone who is a fan of American History, Bob Dylan, the name Dylan (Now I know a little more about my love’s namesake.) and/or photography. It is not hard to find if you google the title and author. With the area of approximately a square foot, it is an ample size to relish in stopped time. The images in this article were provided by the pubisher of the book, ACC Arts Books.
