The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

The photograph shows a 21-year-old Bob Dylan walking arm-in-arm with his then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo down Jones Street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. It is winter; snow and slush line the sidewalks, and the couple huddles together against the cold. Dylan wears a thin jacket and jeans; Rotolo clings to his arm, her face partially turned toward him. Parked cars line the street, and brownstone buildings recede into the background.

The photograph was taken by Don Hunstein, a Columbia Records staff photographer, during a session that also produced promotional images for the album. The walk was staged for the camera but has an unmistakable quality of genuine intimacy — the couple looks truly comfortable together, truly cold, and truly in love. The specific location — Jones Street between West 4th Street and Bleecker Street — has become a pilgrimage site for Dylan fans.

Suze Rotolo was a significant figure in Dylan's life and artistic development. She was politically active (working for the Congress of Racial Equality), introduced Dylan to the visual arts, and was deeply embedded in the Greenwich Village folk and art scene. Many of Dylan's early love songs, including "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" (which appears on this album), are believed to be about Rotolo. They separated in 1964.

Rotolo initially struggled with her association with the photograph, which made her the most famous "girlfriend" in rock history at a time when she wanted to be recognized for her own artistic and political work. She later wrote a memoir, A Freewheelin' Time, reflecting on the period. She died in 2011.

The image was unusual for an album cover at the time — most featured formal studio portraits. The casual, street-level spontaneity of the photo helped define the aesthetic of the folk music movement and established Dylan's image as a romantic, street-level poet rather than a polished entertainer.

The photograph has been parodied and recreated hundreds of times — by other musicians, in films, in advertisements, and by tourists visiting Jones Street. It defined the visual template for singer-songwriter culture: intimate, urban, unpretentious, romantic. It remains one of the most beloved images in music history and essentially created the visual vocabulary of Greenwich Village bohemianism that persists to this day.