ABSTRACT
Dave Van Ronk perceived that the young Dylan was ‘always thinking of the effect that he [was] having’ (Van Ronk, 159). However, although Dylan always seems aware of his photogenic power over the camera, he never appears straightforwardly to invite its attentions. Right from the start of his career, in fact, his magnetic way with a camera lens is inseparable from a deep wariness in face of it. By the mid-60s this wariness is a more or less restrained hostility, a bristling desire to reject the camera’s claims and its voracious desire to hold, package, represent. If Dylan in the 1960s is such a compelling photographic subject, it is because he is a divided and profoundly reluctant one. As he put it himself: ‘It rubs me the wrong way, a camera. It’s a frightening feeling. Cameras make ghosts out of people.’ 1 One suspects that it is the adversarial tension that produces the magic, and that it unfolds from the deepest values of Dylan’s artistic sensibility and their incompatibility with the camera’s intrusive ambition.
