Young Bob: John Cohen's Early Photographs of Bob Dylan

by John Cohen (Photographer), Oscar Brand, Studs Terkel

In 1962, a young John Cohen and the young songwriter Bob Dylan went to Cohen's East Village loft and rooftop for a few hours to make some photos in "a moment of invention…without planning, and with the freedom that comes from uncertainty," recalls Cohen. The never-before-published, black-and-white photographs in Young John Cohen's Early Photographs of Bob Dylan reveal the soon-to-be-legendary musician on the cusp of fame, just before the release of his revolutionary self-titled first album. "These are pictures from a more innocent time at the beginning of Bob Dylan's career," Cohen recalled. "his is what he might have looked like when he first arrived in New York…. the making of these photographs was quite naïve. We weren't into creating a persona for Bob. I was more interested in documenting what was before the camera, and what I was seeing wasn't so clear.

The session was just a free-flowing pursuit of picture making and taking poses. We didn't know what he was going to look like." To complement the images, Cohen has painstakingly transcribed and edited forgotten radio interviews that aired between 1961 and 1963. The interviews conjure up voices from the past, where you can hear a youthful Dylan joking and quipping with WBAI's Cynthia Gooding, WNYC's Oscar Brand, and WFMT's Studs Terkel. With a flourish of color, Cohen's recently rediscovered Ektachromes shot in 1970 for the album "Self Portrait" appear at the end of Young Bob .

These finely constructed "self portraits," art directed by Dylan himself, offer a contrast to the uninhibited loft and rooftop photos and serve as a reminder that just a few years later the famed persona of Dylan had truly been formed and that the young Bob we caught a glimpse of on Cohen's rooftop was now and forever gone.

Genres: Music

72 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2003

Reviews

[Henry Sturcke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This slim collection combines black-and-white photos John Cohen made soon after Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village with transcripts of radio interviews with Oscar Brand, Cynthia Gooding, and Studs Terkel. As Cohen writes, "the portraits presented a side of Bob that I didn't recognize when they were originally taken. . . . They preserved something that was invisible when they were made. They were a remembrance of things to come."
Taken together, the photos and interviews hint at the contradiction at Dylan's core, then and ever since. On the one hand, the master of disguise, spinning yarns to make his childhood and youth a vagabondage out of the pages of Jack Kerouac, meant to obscure not only his small-town middle-class origins but also, one suspects, the intensity of his ambition. On the other, the genuine everyman whose life's calling is no better nor worse than that of any other honest handyman. As Dylan tells Terkel: "I go to saw a tree down, I cut myself. If I go to spit tacks, I swallow tacks. It's a tool--that's all I use it as. My life is a street where I walk. This music, my guitar, that's my tool."
The book also features, as a coda, the color photos Cohen made eight years after the first set, as Dylan was preparing the album, Self-Portrait. One of the photos graced the album's back cover.
When Self-Portrait first appeared, I and many others wondered if the title was ironic, since most of the songs on it were cover versions of other people's songs. It turns out that the irony ran even deeper. At the time, I assumed that the bucolic photo in early spring in New York state was taken on his property near Woodstock in the Saugerties. But it wasn't; it was Cohen's place. Other shots, unseen until this book was published, show him wearing Cohen's jacket and hat, feeding Cohen's chickens, talking with Cohen's dog. We didn't know it at the time, but Dylan had left the Woodstock area and returned to Greenwich Village. But, as usual, covering his trail.