In 1962, a young John Cohen and the 21-year-old 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. 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 revelatory self-titled first album.

Barry Feinstein went on tour with Dylan and, as Jim Marshall says in his introduction to Early Dylan: Photographs by Barry Feinstein, Daniel Kramer and Jim Marshall (Bulfinch Press, 1999), "Barry's... photographs are those of an insider working with Bobby; mine are those of a kind of outsider looking in." Feinstein captured movingly candid moments in his life, while Marshall revealed Dylan as a disillusioned iconoclast.

Bob Dylan not only revolutionized popular music by incorporating poetry in his folk and rock compositions, he also helped create a more inclusive and progressive social consciousness in American culture. "It was as if we were in some worldwide musical stage show and Bob Dylan was writing the lyrics for the entire production," writes Arlo Guthrie in Early Dylan. Like No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese's documentary on Dylan's early career, released in October of 2005, this extraordinary group of photographs reveals Dylan to be the deeply inspired center of a worldwide musical and cultural upheaval, the effects of which still resonate today.

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