Highway 61 Revisited - Packaging

Packaging

The cover photograph was taken by photographer Daniel Kramer several weeks before the recording sessions. Kramer captured Dylan sitting on the stoop of the apartment of his manager, Albert Grossman, located in Gramercy Park, New York, placing Dylan's friend Bob Neuwirth behind Dylan "to give it extra color". Dylan wears a Triumph motorcycle T-shirt under a blue and purple silk shirt, holding his Ray-Ban sunglasses in his right hand. Photographer Kramer commented in 2010 on Dylan's expression, "He's hostile, or it's a hostile moodiness. He's almost challenging me or you or whoever's looking at it: 'What are you gonna do about it, buster?'"

As he had on his previous three albums, Dylan contributed his own writing to the back cover of Highway 61 Revisited, in the shape of freeform, surrealist prose: "On the slow train time does not interfere & at the Arabian crossing waits White Heap, the man from the newspaper & behind him the hundred inevitable made of solid rock & stone." One critic has pointed out the close similarity of these notes to the stream of consciousness, experimental novel Tarantula, which Dylan was writing during 1965 and 1966.