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Chapter 22 - Gender and Sexuality: Bob Dylan’s Body

from Part IV - Political Contexts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2021

Sean Latham
Affiliation:
University of Tulsa
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Summary

The most iconic pictures of Bob Dylan depict him as a giant brain. The photograph on the cover of his first Greatest Hits album, released in 1967, shows the music legend onstage, his face in profile, partly buried in his harmonica-holding hands. He’s backlit, so that his clumpy frizz seems to exude light. This Grammy Award-winning shot by Rowland Scherman relates to an even more famous portrait of Dylan: the one created by the pioneering graphic designer Milton Glaser for a poster insert in that same hits package, which quickly became one of the most ubiquitous illustrations of the late twentieth century. Inspired by both Dada and Pop Art, Glaser rendered Dylan’s face as a solid black mass against a white background, his famous hair a wild tangle of colors, a magic garden sprouting from an overactive mind. By 1971, when Barry Feinstein’s photograph repeated the electrically haloed look yet again for his Greatest Hits Vol. II, Dylan’s head had become a defining image of the era.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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