hunstein | The Genealogy of Style

Bob Dylan & Suze Rotolo in a color image from the iconic photo session for Bob’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

Album cover artwork. This iconic image shows Bob & his girlfriend Suze Rotolo walking down a cold and slushy Greenwich Village street. This groundbreaking album – his second – released in May 1963, includes such Dylan penned classics as Blowin’ in the Wind, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, Girl from the North Country, Masters of War, and Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.

Black and white version

In this rare outtake from the photo sessions for the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” Don Hunstein uses the banisters on the stoop of Dylan’s then-apartment on Greenwich Village’s West 4th Street to visually frame the singer and his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, during a winter’s twilight stroll in February 1963.

Bob Dylan & Suze Rotolo sharing a cold & funny moment during The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan February photo shoot, NYC, 1963

Bob Dylan & Suze Rotolo at their West 4th Street Greenwich Village home. After six months of living with Dylan, Rotolo agreed to her mother’s proposal that she travel to Italy to study art. Dylan missed her and wrote long letters to her conveying his hope that she would return soon to New York. She postponed her return several times, finally coming back in January 1963. Critics have connected the intense love songs expressing longing and loss on Freewheelin’ to Dylan’s fraught relationship with Rotolo.