powerHouse Books, 2003
John Cohen
Hardcover, 72 pages
9.8 x 0.6 x 9.6 inches

In 1962, shortly after arriving in New York, Bob Dylan met fellow musician John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers. The two agreed to a photo session at Cohen’s 10th Street loft once Dylan learned that Cohen was also a photographer. The resulting images made in Cohen's apartment and on the rooftop of his building (where Robert Frank also resided) show the young artist in the process of forming his image.

The never-before-published, black-and-white photographs in Young Bob: 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.

They followed this first shoot with two others in color (Ektachrome) in 1970 for Dylan’s “Self Portrait” album. The first group, taken in SoHo with a zoom lens, were meant to prove that Dylan could walk the streets of his neighborhood - even in front of famed Arturo’s Pizza - without being recognized. A follow-up of casual shots at Cohen’s new home in Putnam Valley present Dylan in Cohen’s hat, with his dog, a barnyard of chickens, and his two young children.

These finely constructed "self portraits" at the end of the book, 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.