Bob Dylan|The Beaten Path 2023

This chapter turns 'The Beaten Path' towards the people in its streets. The 2024 prints were presented as a view of residential America, bringing figures more into focus: people walking under the trees, and music being played outside a house.

Two of the titles, 'Sound of Music' and 'Musical Notes, San Francisco', name that music. 'Green Truck' and 'Hamburger Kuku' keep to more familiar ground, the vehicles and roadside food of earlier prints such as 'Truck and Bull' and 'Hamburger Stand, Long Beach'. The release has been likened to the work of the 1950s photographer Robert Frank, as a record of everyday Americans who never make the news. Dylan put his attachment to the subject plainly in 1978: "Creatively, I couldn't live anywhere but America, because I understand the tone behind the language."

Before and after

The release followed two others in 2024. 'The Beaten Path: The Silkscreen Collection' had grown in January with two new silkscreens, and 'The Beaten Path, Route 66' followed in June with four prints given over to the highway. Where the Route 66 prints stayed on the road, the October chapter moved into town. The series' next release was a landscape, the silkscreen triptych 'Mountain Road', in January 2025. The musicians resurfaced elsewhere: 'Point Blank', released in May 2025, is a set of studies of subjects Dylan encountered or imagined, with titles such as 'Concert Pianist', 'Jazz Guitar Player' and 'Young Man With A Horn'.