In this evocative and personal short film, Don Hunstein takes us back to the streets of New York in 1963 with Bob Dylan and Suze Rotola, and shows us rare and unseen images from the Freewheelin’ sessions.
Set to the soundtrack of Dylan’s ‘Kingsport Town’, this is truly legendary stuff.
Always keen to meet and chat to the Rockarchive photographers, in 2007 Jill Furmanovsky spent an afternoon with Don Hunstein at his apartment on Upper West Side New York. Don was the staff photographer at Columbia Records for many years and has photographed countless artists and musicians throughout his illustrious career.
He recounted stories of working with Miles Davis and Johnny Cash and talked about the day he photographed a young and up-and-coming Bob Dylan on the snowy streets of New York in ’63. “One roll of colour and a few quick black and whites”…resulted in one of Dylan’s most iconic album covers, The Freewheelin’. Fascinating stuff.
This conversation was recorded and filmed but, as so often happens with these kinds of things, the resulting material sat dormant, waiting for time in Jill’s busy schedule to craft it into a film.
Jill recorded conversations with several Rockarchive photographers over the years, and the vision was always to create a series of short films exploring the stories behind their iconic images.
In 2012 Yvonne McConaghy took on the role of producing these short films and together with editor Chris Ranson, produced this first in the series of documentaries for Rockarchive. P
Post production services were provided by one of London’s leading facility companies LipSync.
Set to the soundtrack of Dylan’s Kingsport Town, this film offers a fascinating vignette of a day when rock photographers had rolls of film and time to spend time with the artists without the barriers of PR and entourage.
Don Hunstein has a knack for being in the right place at the right time, documenting many of the 20th Century’s most important musicians.
Early set of contact sheet photos by Don Hunstein taken of Bob Dylan in his New York apartment on West 4th Street in 1963.
Bob Dylan shot while recording his 5th studio album, Bringing It All Back Home, in Columbia Recording Studios in New York City 1965.
Bob Dylan rehearsing to an empty house on the Carnegie Hall stage in New York city, 1963.
An alternative version to the cover of the Bob Dylan Free Wheelin' album, which was similar, but also in colour.
Bob Dylan recording the Freewheelin' album in Columbia Recording Studios, New York City in 1963.
Bob Dylan sitting with his girlfriend Suze Rotolo in their apartment in New York in February 1963
