Bob Dylan, Minnesota native and music icon, is the subject of the Icebox Gallery's current exhibit, "Young Bob."
It's a collection of rarely viewed photographs taken by John Cohen. A number of these photographs are part of Cohen's book, "Young Bob," which shares its focus with the exhibit.
The exhibit contains a total of 39 photographs, the majority taken at Cohen's New York home in 1962, as well as a few photos taken of Dylan in 1970. Cohen is a New York native and member of the New Lost City Ramblers, a folk revival band of the Greenwich Village music scene. Cohen's band and Dylan, along with many others who frequented small clubs in the area, were all key elements of the emerging local folk scene at the time. The Village also became a popular hangout for members of the Beat Generation, including Jack Kerouac, who's also featured in a number of photographs.
"Young Bob" foreshadows Dylan's potential for greatness at the time he was still an unknown player in music, documented during one of the greatest politically charged eras in American history. Some of the photographs were taken from Cohen's rooftop and include Dylan smoking cigarettes and playing the guitar. The images have an innocence that expose the musician's still-intact naiveté, and express the brief moment of anonymity before Dylan's quick rise to fame.
Dylan connected with members of the folk revival and Beat Generation soon after moving to New York a year prior, a trip motivated by the musician's desire to meet his ailing idol, Woody Guthrie. These photographs precede the release of Dylan's self-titled debut the following year; he was only 20 at the time.
Despite Dylan's lack of attention to the leftist ideals commonly found among his peers, the musician's role as a key figure in the folk revival led him to become a key player at several protest movements, including Martin Luther King's legendary march on Washington.
Cohen studied photography and painting at Yale University under Josef Albers, an artist known for his contributions to post painterly abstractions and influence to op art. Cohen's photographs, never previously published, are a part of a vast collection of personal photographs he'd taken of several musicians and abstract expressionist artists, a movement with links in its ideology to the Beat poets.
Cohen's also featured in No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese's 2005 documentary on Dylan, which chronicles the musician's early life up until the motorcycle crash in 1966. The documentary also includes Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Seeger and Al Kooper, among others.
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