Aurelia Butler

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    Daniel Kramer, Who Photographed Bob Dylan’s Rise, Dies at 91

    For 366 days, he captured intimate images of the singer-songwriter as he changed the look and sound of the 1960s.Daniel Kramer, a photojournalist who captured Bob Dylan’s era-tilting transformation from acoustic guitar-strumming folky to electric prince of rock in the mid-1960s, and who shot the covers for his landmark albums “Bringing It All Back Home” and “Highway 61 Revisited,” died on April 29 in Melville, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 91.His death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by his nephew Brian Bereck.Rolling Stone magazine once described Mr. Kramer as “the photographer most closely associated with Bob Dylan.” But that designation seemed highly improbable at the outset.Although Mr. Dylan had already begun his rise to global fame — he released his third album, “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” in early 1964 — Mr. Kramer knew little about him.That changed in February 1964, when he watched the 22-year-old Mr. Dylan perform his rueful ballad “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” on “The Steve Allen Show.” The song details a real event in which a Black woman died after being struck with a cane by a wealthy white man at a white-tie Baltimore party.“I hadn’t heard or seen him,” Mr. Kramer said in a 2012 interview with Time magazine. “I didn’t know his name, but I was riveted by the power of the song’s message of social outrage and to see Dylan reporting like a journalist through his music and lyrics.”As a young Brooklynite trying to carve out a career as a freelance photographer, Mr. Kramer decided he had to arrange a photo shoot with the budding legend. He spent six months dialing the office of Mr. Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman. “The office always said no,” Mr. Kramer said in a 2016 interview with the British newspaper The Guardian. Finally, six months later, Mr. Grossman himself took his call. “He just said, ‘O.K., come up to Woodstock next Thursday.’”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Daniel Kramer’s Year With Bob Dylan

    For six months in 1964, the photojournalist Daniel Kramer, who died at 91 on April 29, dialed the office of Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, to ask if he could photograph Mr. Dylan, a rising star at the time. Finally, Mr. Grossman said yes.What was meant to be a one-hour shoot turned into a five-hour shoot, which turned into a 366-day photographic odyssey in which Mr. Kramer was granted unrivaled access to Mr. Dylan. He captured rare behind-the-scenes images of the artist at home, on tour and at recording sessions.Mr. Kramer’s images were soon popping up in publications around the world. He also shot cover photos for two of Mr. Dylan’s best-known albums.Here is a look at some of those images.Mr. Kramer’s original photograph for the cover of Mr. Dylan’s 1965 album “Bringing It All Back Home.” (The woman in the photo is Sally Grossman, the wife of Mr. Dylan’s manager at the time. She died in 2021.)Daniel Kramer, via Staley-Wise Gallery, New YorkMr. Dylan was surrounded by fans after a concert in Philadelphia in October 1964.Daniel Kramer, via Kramer familyMr. Dylan at the time of the Philadelphia concert.Daniel Kramer, via Kramer familyMr. Dylan with the singer Joan Baez in Woodstock in 1964.Daniel Kramer, via Kramer familyAway from the stage, Mr. Kramer managed to capture Mr. Dylan in rare moments of downtime. Rolling Stone magazine once described him as “the photographer most closely associated with Bob Dylan.”Mr. Dylan in 1964. Although he had already begun his rise to global fame, Mr. Kramer knew little about him until he saw him perform on television that February.Daniel Kramer, via Staley-Wise Gallery, New YorkMr. Dylan during the recording of his album “Bringing It All Back Home.”Daniel Kramer, via Kramer familyMr. Dylan in performance at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens.Daniel Kramer, via Staley-Wise Gallery, New YorkAt a Greenwich Village cafe in 1965.Daniel Kramer, via Staley-Wise Gallery, New YorkBefore his photo shoot with Mr. Dylan, Mr. Kramer was a young Brooklynite trying to carve out a career as a freelance photographer. He went on to shoot portraits of luminaries, always maintaining his ability to connect with them on an intimate level.Mr. Kramer said that the historic significance of what was unfolding before his lens was not always apparent to him at the time. Daniel Kramer, via Kramer family“Bob didn’t really want to be Woody Guthrie,” Mr. Kramer said. “He wanted to be Elvis Presley.”Daniel Kramer, via Staley-Wise Gallery, New YorkOut for a stroll in Philadelphia.Daniel Kramer, via Staley-Wise Gallery, New YorkMr. Kramer took the cover image for “Highway 61 Revisited” in 1965, in front of the Manhattan building where Mr. Dylan’s manager lived.Daniel Kramer, via Staley-Wise Gallery, New York More

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    Cannes: Greta Gerwig, Lily Gladstone and the Weight of Politics at the Fest

    The festival opened with questions for the jury about Indigenous representation, #MeToo rumors and other timely topics.Early on in the meta French comedy “The Second Act,” which was opening the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday night, a father (Vincent Lindon) and daughter (Léa Seydoux) are sitting in his car and chatting about her boyfriend. But just a few lines into the scene, Lindon cracks and refuses to perform it.As he leaves the car to stalk across a field, Seydoux pursues him and tries to continue running their lines. But he is undeterred, claiming the current state of the world is too dire for light comedy.“You’ll carry on as if nothing was wrong, as if everything was fine and dandy?” Lindon says to her. “Mankind is nearly done, and you want to play my daughter in an indie movie?”Though the festival has only just begun, the question of how much the outside world should intrude on cinema has become a pertinent one. At a meeting with the news media on Monday, the Cannes artistic director, Thierry Frémaux, was peppered with so many queries about real-world issues — from the war in Gaza to the #MeToo controversies currently swirling in the French film industry — that he snapped, insisting that he would prefer Cannes to stand apart from such things.“We’re trying to have a festival without this polemical aspect,” Frémaux said. “We’re very careful to maintain that the reason people come here is because of the cinema.”That may be, but the real world can still be felt here: For two weeks, Cannes is a bubble, but a bubble can be popped.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Pressure’: The ‘Mean Streets’ of Brixton

    Newly restored, Horace Ové’s film about a Trinidadian family in London makes a triumphant return to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.The title “Pressure” suggests the force with which this first feature by the Trinidadian British director Horace Ové struck the conscience of a country. The movie, which premiered at the 1975 London Film Festival, was praised by critics and then shelved for three years. Apparently, its producer, the British Film Institute, deemed the public unready for Ové’s blunt depiction of the police violence and racial animus directed at London’s West Indian residents in Brixton.The film’s landmark status has since been recognized by the institute and its maker knighted. Newly restored, the movie is making a triumphant return to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where a 16-millimeter version was previously shown in 2016.With consummate irony, “Pressure” was originally titled “The Immigrant.” Anxiously watched by his Trinidadian family, Tony (Herbert Norville), born and educated in London, attempts to join, and is repeatedly rejected by, the white British world. His mother (Lucita Lijertwood), an overworked house cleaner, is perpetually, vociferously anxious. His father (Frank Singuineau), an accountant turned grocer, is resigned. His older brother, Colin (Oscar James), a Black Power militant who is unemployed, is contemptuous. (The casting mirrors the situation: All but Norville were born in Trinidad.)Written with the Trinidadian novelist Samuel Selvon, “Pressure” is a didactic film, opening with Tony’s mother frying up a traditional English breakfast, with greasy bacon shown in unappetizing close-up, triggering Colin’s disdain for the local cuisine. (He peels and devours an avocado swiped from his father’s store.)Venturing out, Tony, the first-generation Briton, is exposed to Brixton life — suffering a painful job interview, a landlady’s racist diatribe and a Black preacher who urges his congregation to “drive all black thoughts from your hearts.” Alongside these set pieces, neorealist footage captures white reactions to the Black people they pass on the street. Indeed, the streets provide Tony’s education in double consciousness. “Learn how to thieve constructively — for the struggle,” Colin scolds him when Tony is naïvely caught up in a bungled shoplifting caper.Colin likes to posture. His associate Sister Louise (the American actor Sheila Scott-Wilkinson) provides the speechifying. Her political line, racially aware and class-conscious — synthesizing the thinking of two Trinidadian activists Ové admired, the Black Power firebrand Stokely Carmichael and the internationalist historian C.L.R. James — brings down the power of the state in the form of riot police.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Legacy of Steve Albini, Rock’s Uncompromising Force

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicSteve Albini, who died last week at 61, was one of the most admired, and most divisive, figures in rock. He was an expert audio engineer who recorded ultra-classics by Nirvana, PJ Harvey and Pixies, along with key underground releases by the Jesus Lizard, Slint, Low, Neurosis and many, many others. For decades, he also relished his role as a brutally insulting critic — sometimes of the bands he worked with — and a gadfly who pushed uncomfortable buttons about race, politics and sex. He came to regret that, owning up to his history of provocation for its own sake.On this week’s Popcast, guest hosted by the music reporter Ben Sisario, we delve into Albini’s musical legacy and his singular role as a moral scourge in rock and of the music business overall.Guests:Jeremy Gordon, a senior editor at The Atlantic, who interviewed Albini last year in The GuardianJoe Gross, freelance writer and former critic at The Austin American-StatesmanConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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    Iranian Film Director Mohammad Rasoulof Flees Country After Jail Sentence

    Mohammad Rasoulof, known for the award-winning “There Is No Evil,” had been barred from leaving Iran after his work criticized the country’s clerical leadership.The celebrated Iranian film director Mohammad Rasoulof said he had fled the country, after a court sentenced him to eight years in prison for his movies.Mr. Rasoulof — known for his award-winning film “There Is No Evil” — had been barred from leaving Iran after his work criticized life under authoritarian rule in the country. His lawyer, Babak Paknia, wrote last week on social media that a court had sentenced Mr. Rasoulof to imprisonment, whipping and a fine for movies that it called “examples of collusion with the intention of committing a crime against the country’s security.”On Monday, Mr. Rasoulof announced his escape from Iran in an Instagram post that featured a video of snow-capped mountains and said he had reached a “safe place” after a “difficult and long journey.”Addressing Iran’s clerical rulers, Mr. Rasoulof said he had been forced to leave “because of your oppression and barbarity,” and that he had now joined Iranians in exile who were “impatiently waiting to bury you and your machine of oppression in the depths of history.”He did not provide details on his location or respond to a message from The New York Times.“There Is No Evil” — which focused on executioners in Iran — won the top prize in the Berlin International Film Festival in 2020. Mr. Rasoulof, who had directed the film in secret, was not allowed to leave the country to attend that award ceremony.A scene from Mr. Rasoulof’s “There Is No Evil,” which won the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2020.Kino LorberIran’s film industry is acclaimed internationally and heavily policed at home, where the authorities can ban screening and filming.Mr. Rasoulof’s new movie, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” is set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in France this month.Some of the film’s producers were interrogated by the authorities and some of its actors were barred from leaving the country, Mr. Paknia said in social media posts last month.Mr. Rasoulof told The New York Times in 2020 that early on in his career he had used allegorical stories to avoid confronting power directly, but eventually felt that was “a form of accepting the tyrannical regime.”He went on to offer sharp critiques of Iran’s clerical rulers with his films, including “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” and “A Man of Integrity” — which won an award at Cannes in 2017.Over the years, the Iranian authorities had charged him with propaganda against the state, confiscated his passport, arrested and prosecuted him.In a statement released on Monday, Mr. Rasoulof said “the scope and intensity of repression has reached a point of brutality where people expect news of another heinous government crime every day.”Leily Nikounazar More

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    Black Satire Is Having Its Hollywood Moment, but Something Is Missing

    Recent releases like “American Fiction” and “The American Society of Magical Negroes” have used absurdist humor to examine race. But they have also depicted narrow views of Blackness.In 2017, Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” was a critical and commercial smash that immediately became one of the defining movies of the Trump Era. The next year, Boots Riley’s masterful “Sorry to Bother You” seemed to herald a new golden age for Black satire films. But as those movies stood out for using surreal plot twists to humorously — and horrifically — unpack complex ideas like racial appropriation and consumer culture, the crop that has followed hasn’t kept pace. The current moment is defined by a central question: What does the “Black” look like in Black satire films today? Too often lately it’s “not Black enough.”By that I mean to say a recent influx of films, including “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” “American Fiction” and “The Blackening,” have failed to represent Blackness with all its due complexity — as sometimes messy, sometimes contradictory. Instead, they flatten and simplify Blackness to serve a more singular, and thus digestible, form of satirical storytelling.The foremost example is “American Fiction,” inspired by Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure,” which won this year’s Oscar for best screenplay. In the film, a Black author and professor named Monk (played by Jeffrey Wright) finds literary success through “My Pafology,” a novel satirizing books that feed negative Black stereotypes. But Monk’s audience receives his book with earnest praise, forcing him to reconcile his newfound prosperity with his racial ethics.The surface layer of satire is obvious: The white audiences and publishing professionals who celebrate “My Pafology” do so not because of its merits but because the book allows them to fetishize another tragic Black story. It’s a performance of racial acceptance; these fans are literally buying into their own white guilt.Monk’s foil in the film is another Black author, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), who publishes a popular book of sensationalist Black trauma about life in the ghetto. Profiting on her white audience’s racist assumptions about Blackness, Sintara is this satire’s race traitor — or so it initially seems. Because when, in one scene, Monk questions whether Sintara’s book is any different from “My Pafology,” which she dismisses as pandering, she counters that she is spotlighting an authentic Black experience. Sintara accuses Monk of snobbery, saying that his highfalutin notion of Blackness excludes other Black experiences because he is too ashamed to recognize them.But the fact that it is Sintara who voices the film’s criticism of Monk shows how loath “American Fiction” is to make a value statement on the characters’ actions within the context of their Blackness. Sintara, whom Monk catches reading “White Negroes,” a text about Black cultural appropriation, somehow isn’t winkingly framed as the hypocrite or the inauthentic one pointing out the hypocrisy and inauthenticity of the hero.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    David Sanborn, Saxophonist Who Defied Pigeonholing, Dies at 78

    He was best known as a jazz musician, but his shimmering sound was also heard on classic albums by David Bowie, Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen.David Sanborn, whose fiery alto saxophone flourishes earned him six Grammy Awards, eight gold albums and a platinum one, and who established himself as a celebrity sideman, lending indelible solos to enduring rock classics like David Bowie’s “Young Americans,” died on Sunday. He was 78.He died after a long battle with prostate cancer, according to a statement on his social media channels. He had received the diagnosis in 2018 but had maintained his regular schedule of concerts until recently, with more planned for next year.The statement did not say where Mr. Sanborn died.Drawing from jazz, pop and R&B, Mr. Sanborn was highly prolific, releasing 25 albums over a six-decade career. “Hideaway” (1980), his fifth studio album, featured two instrumentals written with the singer Michael McDonald as well as “The Seduction,” written by Giorgio Moroder, which was the love theme from “American Gigolo,” the ice-cool Paul Schrader film starring Richard Gere.“Many releases by studio musicians suffer from weak compositions and overproduction, including some albums by Sanborn himself,” Tim Griggs wrote in a review of that album on the website Allmusic. In contrast, he continued, “Hideaway” had a “stripped-down, funky” quality that showed off his “passionate and distinctive saxophone sound.”Mr. Sanborn’s albums “Hearsay” (1994), “Pearls” (1995) and “Time Again” (2003) all reached No. 2 on the Billboard jazz chart.Mr. Sanborn joined Miles Davis onstage at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in 1986. He worked with a long list of musicians, both in and out of jazz.Keystone/ReduxWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More