Daniel Kramer, a photojournalist who captured Bob Dylan’s era-tilting transformation from acoustic guitar-strumming folky to electrical prince of rock within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, and who shot the covers for his landmark albums “Bringing It All Again Residence” and “Freeway 61 Revisited,” died on April 29 in Melville, N.Y., on Lengthy Island. He was 91.
His dying, in a nursing house, was confirmed by his nephew Brian Bereck.
Rolling Stone journal as soon as described Mr. Kramer as “the photographer most intently related to Bob Dylan.” However that designation appeared extremely unbelievable on the outset.
Though Mr. Dylan had already begun his rise to world fame — he launched his third album, “The Occasions They Are a-Changin’,” in early 1964 — Mr. Kramer knew little about him.
That modified in February 1964, when he watched the 22-year-old Mr. Dylan carry out his rueful ballad “The Lonesome Loss of life of Hattie Carroll” on “The Steve Allen Present.” The tune particulars an actual occasion by which a Black girl died after being struck with a cane by a rich white man at a white-tie Baltimore get together.
“I hadn’t heard or seen him,” Mr. Kramer stated in a 2012 interview with Time journal. “I didn’t know his identify, however I used to be riveted by the facility of the tune’s message of social outrage and to see Dylan reporting like a journalist via his music and lyrics.”
As a younger Brooklynite attempting to carve out a profession as a contract photographer, Mr. Kramer determined he needed to organize a photograph shoot with the budding legend. He spent six months dialing the workplace of Mr. Dylan’s supervisor, Albert Grossman. “The workplace at all times stated no,” Mr. Kramer stated in a 2016 interview with the British newspaper The Guardian. Lastly, six months later, Mr. Grossman himself took his name. “He simply stated, ‘O.Ok., come as much as Woodstock subsequent Thursday.’”
A one-hour shoot on Aug. 27 become a five-hour shoot, which become a 366-day photographic odyssey by which Mr. Kramer captured uncommon behind-the-scenes photographs of Mr. Dylan at house, on tour and in recording periods as he was lighting the fuse that helped spark the countercultural explosion of the Nineteen Sixties.
Quickly Mr. Kramer’s Dylan photographs have been popping up in publications around the globe. Mr. Kramer printed two collections, “Bob Dylan” (1967) and “Bob Dylan: A Yr and a Day” (2018), which contained almost 200 images.
To Dylanologists, 1965 was the yr of the large bang. In July, the longer term Nobel Prize winner shocked traditionalists on the Newport Folks Pageant by ditching his acoustic guitar for a Fender Stratocaster, backed by a completely amplified band.
It was one of the storied, and dissected, moments in rock historical past. “In most tellings, Dylan represents youth and the longer term, and the individuals who booed have been caught within the dying previous,” Elijah Wald wrote in “Dylan Goes Electrical!” (2015). “However there’s one other model, by which the viewers represents youth and hope, and Dylan was shutting himself off behind a wall of electrical noise, locking himself in a citadel of wealth and energy.”
As Mr. Kramer later put it: “Bob didn’t actually wish to be Woody Guthrie. He wished to be Elvis Presley.”
The photographer had his personal quibble about this historic second: At a shoot at a Columbia Data studio in New York for the seismic 1965 album “Bringing It All Again Residence,” he had already witnessed Mr. Dylan plugging in and forging his personal model of rock ’n’ roll.
“Individuals at all times say that Dylan went electrical at Newport in the summertime of 1965,” he advised Rolling Stone. “Nicely, to not me he didn’t. I noticed him go electrical that January, when it was nonetheless snowing.”
Mr. Kramer additionally shot the quilt picture for the album. One of the vital recognizable in rock historical past, it depicts a dapper Mr. Dylan seated with a cat on his lap in the lounge of Mr. Grossman’s home close to Woodstock, N.Y., surrounded by a jumble of magazines, document albums and a fallout shelter signal, together with his supervisor’s spouse, Sally Grossman, in a crimson costume, staring on from a settee behind him. Mr. Kramer earned a Grammy nomination for the picture.
Mr. Kramer later stated that he took solely 10 photographs that day, and that the ultimate picture was chosen as a result of it was “the one one by which the cat was wanting on the lens.”
He additionally mentioned the round aurora impact overlaying the picture, which lent it psychedelic overtones.
“Individuals suppose I used Vaseline to create that round picture or that it’s a blur,” Mr. Kramer as soon as stated. “That’s not what I did. It’s two totally different photos on one movie. One is moved, and one will not be. I wished to simulate a document spinning or the universe of music.”
Later that yr, Mr. Kramer shot the quilt for “Freeway 61 Revisited,” an off-the-cuff candid exhibiting Mr. Dylan, in a Triumph bikes T-shirt, seated on the stoop of the Manhattan constructing the place his supervisor lived and flashing a vaguely menacing glare. “He’s nearly difficult me otherwise you or whoever’s taking a look at it,” Mr. Kramer recalled: “‘What are you gonna do about it, buster?’”
Mr. Kramer was born on Could 19, 1932, in Brooklyn, the eldest of three kids of Irving Kramer, a dockworker and newbie filmmaker, and Ethel (Berland) Kramer, a hospital administrator.
“At an early age I migrated to the digicam,” he stated in a 1995 interview with The New York Occasions. “By age 14, I had a one-boy present on the junior highschool.
He labored as an assistant to the photographer Philippe Halsman, and to the workforce of Allan and Diane Arbus, along with learning at Brooklyn Faculty and serving within the U.S. Military.
Throughout his yr with Mr. Dylan, Mr. Kramer was granted unequalled entry. In an interview printed by Govinda Gallery in Washington, which mounted an exhibition of his Dylan images in 1999, Mr. Kramer recalled a present at Lincoln Middle in New York in October 1964, the place the venue’s administration knowledgeable Mr. Kramer that he can be restricted to a glass-enclosed balcony throughout the efficiency.
“So Bob stated to his supervisor, ‘You inform them right here that if he can’t do no matter he desires to do, I’m not occurring,’” Mr. Kramer recalled.
Away from the stage, he managed to seize Mr. Dylan in uncommon moments of downtime — aiming a cue in an upstate New York pool corridor, taking part in chess in a Woodstock cafe. Considered one of his most well-known photographs from the interval was a black-and-white portrait of Mr. Dylan in sun shades, standing in entrance of the empty bleachers of Forest Hills Stadium in Queens earlier than a live performance on Aug. 28, 1965.
That shoot marked the top of Mr. Kramer’s run as Mr. Dylan’s de facto home photographer. “I didn’t need individuals to suppose that’s all I did,” he stated.
Capturing portraits of luminaries for quite a lot of publications through the years, he maintained his skill to attach with them on an intimate degree. “I’ve had a writing lesson from Norman Mailer, a boxing lesson from Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, and a harmonica lesson from Bob Dylan,” he advised The Occasions.
Mr. Kramer married Arline Cunningham in 1968. She died in 2016. No speedy members of the family survive.
Whereas he was nicely conscious that he was privileged to function a witness to pop music historical past, Mr. Kramer later stated that the magnitude of what was unfolding earlier than his lens was not at all times so obvious on the time.
“You don’t know somebody’s altering the world,” he stated, “till the world’s been modified.”
