The same cheap industrial neighborhood drew avant-garde and mainstream imagery makers alike

Evidence

Danny Lyon and Ken Jacobs were not the only artists documenting the Swamp. Samuel Beckett was in town July 1964, shooting a movie with Buster Keaton under the Brooklyn Bridge, only blocks from Jacobs’s Ferry Street loft. A year later, the Hollywood production A Fine Madness used the same location. Most uncannily, Jerry Schatzberg posed Bob Dylan near the deserted junction of Ferry and Jacob Streets for the photographs found on the sleeve of Blonde on Blonde, as well as that of Dylan’s 45 “I Want You,” and the cover of the July 30 issue of the Saturday Evening Post under the headline: “BOB DYLAN: REBEL KING OF ROCK ’N’ ROLL.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1970

Categorization

• XREF: The convergence of Beckett, Hollywood, and Bob Dylan’s album cover at the same desolate corner shows the neighborhood functioning as an image-commodity — support for the reader’s thesis that the scene’s cheap material conditions converted it into a marketable backdrop.
• SEED: A strong angle: the Blonde on Blonde cover photo planted at a razed, soon-to-be-redeveloped intersection as the moment the underground’s territory got packaged and sold as a product image.