Between 1959 and 1970, John Cohen, himself an active participant in the music scene, captured photographs of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, “two titans of American music at the opposite ends of their careers,” said Bob Santelli, exhibit curator. Been Here and Gone: Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and the 1960s, featuring color and black-and-white prints, coincides with both the release of Dylan’s new album, Another Self Portrait 1969-1971, and Guthrie’s centennial.
In 1970, Cohen made photographs of a young Dylan in New York City near Dylan’s home in Greenwich Village and in Putnam Valley around Cohen’s farmhouse. Ektachrome slides of these photo sessions were recently unearthed during the selection of unreleased recordings and demos from the period for Dylan’s new Bootleg Series album. From these, limited edition prints have been made and are now available for the first time.
A decade earlier, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a revival of folk music was taking place, and Woody Guthrie, American folk music’s most influential figure, was making his last appearances. Cohen spent time with Guthrie during this period and made intimate photographs of the music icon.
In addition to being a photographer and filmmaker, Cohen is also a musician who for 50 years performed and recorded with the New Lost City Ramblers, one of the folk revival’s most authentic and respected groups. His archive resides at the Library of Congress, and his photographs are in many important private collections as well as the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and Brooklyn Museum in New York; New York Public Library; Philadelphia Museum of Art; National Gallery of Art and National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.; Yale University Art Gallery in Connecticut; and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
