Actress Jessica Lange Is Paying Homage to Bob Dylan With a Stunning Set of Photographs Taken Along Highway 61. See Her Photos Here
In Bob Dylan’s song, “Highway 61
Revisited,” from his epochal album of the same name, the famous
stretch of road that connects the Canadian border to Louisiana is
imagined as a surreal site of escape, murder, and
war-mongering.
This was the first album that
Jessica Lange, the two-time Academy Award-winning actress and
photographer, bought, when she was 16 years old. Living in
Minnesota at the time—Dylan’s home state, too—she knew the highway
well, having traveled it countless times throughout her childhood
to visit family who lived throughout the eight states bisected by
the throughway.
Now, more than five decades
later, the actress is revisiting the stretch of road through a new
book, Highway
61.
The publication, out now through
the publisher powerHouse, includes 84 grainy black-and-white
photographs that Lange shot while driving the stretch of road in
recent years.
Actress Jessica Lange poses in front of
her black-and-white photographs at the Ateliers de l’Image southern
France. Photo: Gerard Julien/AFP/Getty Images.
Lange’s vision of the
highway, which connects her home in New Orleans to her summer
cabin in northern Minnesota, is quite different from
Dylan’s.
Instead of a hallucinatory yarn
filled with gun-toting, god-fearing characters like Mack the Finger
and Louie the King, Lange’s vision is populated with working-class
dishwashers and diner patrons, transients and ranch hands, and
loitering smokers silhouetted in the streetlight.
Without the book’s afterword,
which alludes to the fact that these photos were taken
recently, you’d think they
depict the middle America of decades ago, like long-lost Robert
Frank outtakes.
This is Lange’s third photo
book, following a monograph of personal pictures titled
50
Photographs (published in 2008 by powerHouse) and
In Mexico
(RM, 2010), which included candid
photos taken south of the Rio Grande.
The actress studied art and
photography at the University of Minnesota on scholarship before
dropping out, moving to Europe, and beginning her acting career in
Paris. She began taking pictures in earnest again in the mid-‘90s
when her partner at the time, actor and playwright Sam Shepard,
brought her a Leica camera from Germany.
Next Friday, October 11,
Lange will be
signing copies of
Highway 61
at Barnes and Noble in New
York. A solo exhibition
dedicated to the series will open November 21 at Howard Greenberg
Gallery.
See more of Lange’s
Highway 61
photographs below.
From Highway 61 by Jessica Lange,
published by powerHouse Books. Courtesy of the artist and
powerHouse Books.
From Highway 61 by Jessica Lange,
published by powerHouse Books. Courtesy of the artist and
powerHouse Books.
From Highway 61 by Jessica Lange,
published by powerHouse Books. Courtesy of the artist and
powerHouse Books.
From Highway 61 by Jessica Lange,
published by powerHouse Books. Courtesy of the artist and
powerHouse Books.
From Highway 61 by Jessica Lange,
published by powerHouse Books. Courtesy of the artist and
powerHouse Books.
From Highway 61 by Jessica Lange,
published by powerHouse Books. Courtesy of the artist and
powerHouse Books.
From Highway 61 by Jessica Lange,
published by powerHouse Books. Courtesy of the artist and
powerHouse Books.
From Highway 61 by Jessica Lange,
published by powerHouse Books. Courtesy of the artist and
powerHouse Books.
The post Actress Jessica Lange Is Paying Homage to Bob Dylan
With a Stunning Set of Photographs Taken Along Highway 61. See Her
Photos Here appeared first on artnet News.
Read more https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/jessica-lange-highway-61-1669138
Further reading
Leave a comment