Bringing It All Back Home. The Dylan breakthrough portfolio

Daniel Kramer’s classic Bob Dylan portfolio captures the artist’s transformative “big bang” year of 1964–65. Over the course of a year and a day, Kramer’s extraordinary access to Bob Dylan on tour, in concert, and backstage, allowed for one of the most mesmerizing photographic portfolios of any recording artist and a stunning document of Dylan breaking through to superstardom.

Highlights include the Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall concert with Joan Baez; the Bringing It All Back Home recording sessions; and the now-famous concert at Forest Hills, when Dylan’s controversial transition to electric guitar exemplified his constant, cryptic state of becoming. As much a document of a seminal period of rock ’n’ roll history as of Dylan himself, the pictures also feature such compelling friends and collaborators as Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Allen Ginsberg, and Albert Grossman.

Bob Dylan: A Year and a Day presents a curated selection of nearly 200 images, including outtakes from the Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited album cover shoots. Previously published by TASCHEN as a signed Collector’s Edition, this standard edition is the more affordable boon to any serious photography or Dylan fan. With stories throughout the book by Kramer, this is at once an intimate and evocative testament to a seminal photographer, to a particular point in time, and to an exceptional, mysterious artist at the moment his career went global.

The photographer

Daniel Kramer is a photographer and filmmaker whose portraits and picture stories have been published worldwide; his film work encompasses documentaries and commercials. But it is his photographs of Bob Dylan, the first major work published about the young artist on his way from superstar to icon during 1964 and 1965, which catapulted Kramer’s work onto the international stage. A master printer, Kramer’s photographs are widely collected and exhibited. Brooklyn born, he lives in New York City.

In 2008, Bob Dylan became the first rock artist to win a Pulitzer Prize, for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." A musician, poet, and celebrated nonconformist of unparallelled stature, Dylan is revered by critics and fans alike as the most influential singer-songwriter in the history of popular music. For over four decades he has inspired folk and rock lovers around the world. His distinct brand of personal philosophy and socio-political comment has metamorphosed through a variety of musical forms, from traditional folk, blues, and country, to gospel and rock and roll, all the while establishing a unique soundtrack to our lives.

Setting out in 1961 as a young man with a guitar and a harmonica, this enigmatic artist has grown into an international cultural icon, the tireless author of over 30 albums and a relentless live performer. This concise overview covers Dylan’s entire career via texts and images.

The Music Icons series:
Each title contains a painstaking selection of approximately 150 portraits, colorful posters and record covers, rare concert photos, and previously unpublished candid photos. These images—each matching an important biographical event—are accompanied by text tracing the progression of the subject’s life and career and complemented by lists of essential recordings and selected chart rankings.