“dylan wanted his picture taken wearing his suede jacket”

Don Hunstein worked for Columbia Records for eight years when he first met Bob Dylan in 1962. He’d originally been employed to sort the archives, but when his superiors discovered his photography talent they saddled him up with a camera and sent him off to capture their roster of musicians.

“Don was told to get a studio shot of Bob for his debut album,” DeeAnne Hunstein, Don’s wife of over 50 years, begins, stepping in to tell the tale after a decade of Alzheimer’s has all but robbed the photographer of his memories. “It was not considered an important assignment at the time, because Dylan was a brand new artist, nobody had any idea who he was. Some people thought, ‘Come on, this little guy from Minnesota, who is he?’ But much to their surprise, that recording sold really very well and suddenly there was all this buzz about this new artist.”

Eager to feed growing public intrigue and impressed by Don’s work, Columbia Records sent him to Dylan’s apartment in Greenwich Village to get more images. “It was February 1963 and Goddard Lieberson, who was the head of studios at the time, said to Don, ‘You get down there and do some pictures of him, because we’re going to need them.’ At that point there was nothing except that one studio shot that Don had taken. So off he went to where Bob was living with his girlfriend Suze Rotolo on West 4th Street.

“Don got plenty of nice shots, they’re sitting on a chair with the stuffing falling out of it, things like that, and they made sweet pictures, but they exhausted that. ‘Why don’t we go out onto the street, just for a few pictures,’ said Don. He always liked to do something different, and they lived right in front of a little dead-end street. Dylan said, ‘Oh but it’s really cold out,’ and it was, it was bitter cold. But Don said, ‘We won’t be long, we’ll just do it very quickly’. Suze got her warmest sweater and a big coat to go over it, but Dylan wanted his picture taken wearing his suede jacket, because he was fashion-conscious. She thought he was foolish to go out in that weather in a suede jacket, but that’s what he insisted on.”

With no through traffic to worry about, Don positioned himself in the middle of a snow-laden Jones Street between two rows of parked cars, fronted on the left by a blue VW bus. “Don said, ‘Now you just go down to the end of the street and walk down towards me’ and that’s where he took all of these pictures. It all happened in 15 minutes as they were getting cold. You can see from the picture that Dylan is hunched over and she�