The American photographer Daniel Kramer, who has died aged 91, was simply starting his skilled profession when by probability he caught a younger folks singer’s efficiency on the Steve Allen Present on 25 February 1964. Till that second, Kramer had by no means heard of Bob Dylan, however the 22-year-old singer’s stirring rendition of his stark protest music The Lonesome Dying of Hattie Carroll caught his consideration.
“He might have had a guitar in his hand, however the lyrics had been poetry,” Kramer later recalled of Dylan’s supply. “And, he needed to be very courageous as a result of, should you stated issues like that you could possibly get shot.”
Kramer was so impressed that he started repeatedly calling and mailing the workplace of Dylan’s supervisor, Albert Grossman, with requests to {photograph} the singer. His persistence lastly paid off after six months when Grossman himself answered the telephone and, to Kramer’s shock, gave him the go-ahead for a photoshoot. It befell a couple of days later at Grossman’s home in Woodstock, upstate New York, the deliberate one-hour session stretching to 5 hours.
In monochrome tones, Kramer captured Dylan posing on a swing on Grossman’s entrance porch, deep in focus throughout a recreation of chess with a good friend at a neighborhood cafe and, in a single mischievous shot, pointing one in every of Kramer’s personal cameras again at him. Months later, he accompanied Dylan on tour, creating memorable photographs of the singer on and offstage, together with one the place the singer is lifted off his toes by Joan Baez following a triumphant live performance on the Lincoln Middle, New York.
With hindsight, the images are an intimate doc of a short interlude of calm earlier than the storm of creativity and controversy that might observe. It was Kramer’s nice good luck to meetDylan when the singer was on the cusp of a surge of creativity that might see him dramatically reinvent himself and, within the course of, redefine what standard music may do.
Kramer was in attendance as soon as once more in January 1965 to doc the New York recording periods that produced the Bringing It All Again Dwelling album, launched in March of that 12 months. It marked Dylan’s controversial transfer from an acoustic to an electrical sound, and that shift was additionally mirrored in Kramer’s cowl picture.
It encompasses a extra consciously fashionable Dylan staring intently into the digital camera, as Grossman’s glamorous spouse, Sally, lounges, cigarette in hand, on a settee behind him. The pair are enclosed by a blurred circle of sunshine that renders the whole lot on the sting of the {photograph} vague. “Folks suppose I used Vaseline to create that round picture,” Kramer stated. “That’s not what I did. It’s two completely different footage on one movie. One is moved, and one shouldn’t be. I wished to simulate a report spinning or the universe of music.” Dylan, Kramer’s picture intimated, was now on the centre of his personal, singular, inventive universe.
Bringing It All Again Dwelling was Kramer’s first expertise of capturing an album cowl. From the cat sitting on Dylan’s lap to the plethora of symbolic objects scattered round him – together with albums by Lotte Lenya, Robert Johnson and Ravi Shankar, a fallout shelter signal, varied artworks and magazines – the quilt picture echoes the music therein by signifying a courageous new starting.
As Kramer later stated of Dylan’s transformation, “On the primary 4 albums, he’s a folks singer. He’s in folks singer garments … On Bringing It All Again Dwelling, he’s a prince in his blazer and his stunning cufflinks, sitting with this stunning cat and a ravishingly stunning girl behind him in a purple costume. It was a change. All the things was altering.”
In August of the identical 12 months, Kramer additionally shot the quilt for one more basic Dylan album, Freeway 61 Revisited. This time, the session was extra impromptu, with Kramer capturing the singer as he sat on a stoop of the constructing the place Grossman lived in Gramercy Park, New York, carrying a Triumph Bikes T-shirt and a multicoloured shiny shirt.
The photograph session, which lasted round 20 minutes, befell simply after the recording of Dylan’s epochal music Like A Rolling Stone, and once more the picture reaffirms his defiant inventive reinvention. “He seems hostile or no less than moody,” Kramer stated later. “He appears to problem me – or whoever he seems at – ‘What are you going to do about it, dude?’”
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Daniel was the eldest of three kids of Ethel (nee Berland), a hospital administrator, and Irving Kramer, who labored on the docks. Irving was additionally an beginner film-maker in his spare time, and should have been a formative affect on the younger Daniel, who gravitated to images early on. Aged 14, he hosted a solo exhibition of his personal work at his junior highschool. He later joined the military’s Navy Police Corps for a time earlier than turning into a pupil at Brooklyn School.
He was mentored for a time by the esteemed photojournalist W Eugene Smith, a pioneer of the editorial photograph essay, and labored as a studio assistant for each Philippe Halsman and Diane Arbus earlier than embarking on his solo freelance profession. He had not lengthy established his personal studio when he made the fateful journey to Woodstock to {photograph} the singer who had so fascinated him on a TV selection present.
Though he made memorable portraits of different celebrities, together with Muhammad Ali, Janis Joplin, Johnny Money and Norman Mailer, Kramer’s title was for ever related to Dylan.
In 2016, he revealed a 300-plus-page e-book, A Yr and a Day, which included many beforehand unseen photographs of the artist. Based on Kramer, it contained solely a fraction of the images he shot throughout their fruitful inventive partnership, which ended a 12 months and a day after the pair first met.
In late August 1965, Dylan carried out at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, New York. It was the primary time he had performed a complete gig with an electrical band and Kramer captured Dylan on the soundcheck, in shades and holding his electrical guitar, with an nearly empty stadium behind him.
He seems preoccupied, perhaps even somewhat nervous, his alert manner suggesting somebody ready to go to battle along with his viewers for the sake of his artwork. It’s a great distance from the easygoing environment that Kramer had captured only a 12 months earlier than within the leafy environs of Woodstock.
Again then, as Kramer later put it, they had been “simply a few guys taking some footage that day to see what we may do”. What Dylan went on to do within the following months would alter the course of standard music. Kramer was there to doc him do it and, within the course of, {photograph} his approach into historical past.
Kramer married Arline Cunningham in 1968. She died in 2016. He’s survived by a niece and three nephews.
