They were the most mercurial years od a tempestuous career ... and Jerry Shatzberg's camera was able to capture the drama of an artist at the peak of his powers. The photographer tells Alan Taylor he he did it

JERRY Schatzberg requires little prompting to recall the first time he encountered Bob Dylan. In all probability, the year was 1965, Dylan's annus mirabilis, when he released the albums Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. Of course, Schatzberg had heard about Dylan before then; who among the bums and bohemians of New York's Greenwich Village had not?

In a few frantic years, a mystique had grown up around the whippet-thin, tousle-haired singer-songwriter from the "frost-bitten North Country" of Minnesota. In his memoir, Chronicles: Volume 1, Dylan recalled his younger self. "I could transcend the limitations," he wrote. "It wasn't money or love I was looking for. I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and visionary to boot. My mind was strong like a trap and I didn't need any guarantee of validity."

Such self-assurance was instantly apparent to Schatzberg, then a photographer, now perhaps best known as a movie director, among whose credits are Puzzle Of A Downfall Child (1970), starring Faye Dunaway, and The Panic In Needle Park (1971), with Al Pacino. Speaking from his apartment on New York City's Upper West Side, where he has lived for almost 40 years, the 81-year-old recalls that he was introduced to Dylan through Sara Lowndes, the latter's wife and muse, the eponymous Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands, and a sometime Bunny Girl at the Playboy Club. When Schatzberg got to know her she was trying to break into modelling and he was being commissioned by magazines such as McCall's, Vogue and Esquire.

"I guess she came to the studio and we became friends," he says. "We'd see each other, you know, for dinner and things like that and she began to talk about Bob Dylan." Another female friend who couldn't stop talking about Dylan, adds Schatzberg, was Nico, the Velvet Underground's blonde chanteuse. "Oh Bob Dylan," she'd say, "you got to see him." His curiosity roused, Schatzberg listened and liked what he heard. Through contacts in the music business he let it be known he'd love to photograph Dylan.

A call came the next day from Lowndes, who told him Dylan was happy to be photographed by him. Dylan was then recording at a Columbia studio on Seventh Avenue. You can see him now, walking into the studio, a battered guitar case in one hand, a couple of bottles of Beaujolais in the other, wearing dark glasses, his hair long and unruly, dressed in jeans and desert boots.

This was the beginning of a relationship between the photographer and his subject that was to last until July 29, 1966, still a fateful date on the calendar of many Dylanophiles. Riding his beloved Triumph motorbike, Dylan sailed over the handlebars and saw his whole life pass in front of him.

"What I've been doin' mostly is seein' only a few close friends," he said in a rare interview about a year later, "readin' little 'bout the world outside, porin' over books by people you never heard of, thinkin' about where I'm goin', and why am I runnin', and am I mixed up too much, and what am I knowin', and what am I givin' and what am I takin.'"

Luckily, by then Schatzberg had taken the 60 or so photographs that will feature in his forthcoming exhibition at Proud Galleries in London later this month. What is clear from them is Dylan's relaxed aura and his willingness to co-operate. Thanks initially to his wife's reassurance, he obviously trusted Schatzberg. Though some shots were taken in the photographer's studio and were therefore posed, many more were taken when Dylan was unaware that the shutter was clicking. These are the ones Schatzberg prefers. Having said that, he says, photographing Dylan is a dream assignment. "It's difficult to point a camera at him and not get a picture."

Accounts of this period in Dylan's life show him growing increasingly suspicious of outsiders. Always self-assured, he was also inclined to be arrogant. At the Kettle Of Fish, a bar in the Village, where he and Schatzberg would hang out with other aspiring writers, artists and musicians, Dylan's wit occasionally turned caustic. In those days, the singer-songwriter Phil Ochs recalled, Dylan could be "super-arrogant". "You're a journalist," he once told Ochs. "You shouldn't try to write."

"And he went through this whole fantastic riff of how we shouldn't try to write, and that he was really the writer," Ochs has said. But when Ochs told Dylan that a new song wasn't as good as his earlier stuff, Dylan ejected him from his car.

Schatzberg, who witnessed at least one such verbal joust, says Dylan was not someone who was tolerant of fools. "I'd see the way he'd act with people. He was very suspicious. He didn't want to run into journalists who were asking stupid questions; he didn't mind talking to people who made sense, but when they didn't he was very suspicious. And also with people who were becoming hangers-on. I'm not the kind who joins other people's entourages and stuff like that. So we got along just great."

When Dylan finished recording a song, he always liked to hear it played back. "Hey guys, you gotta hear this," he'd say. "Gotta hear this." Does he remember what songs he heard Dylan play the first time he photographed him? "It may have been Desolation Row," he says. "I can't swear it, but it might have been. I listened to a portion of it and I thought it was just awesome."

I mention that I once interviewed Kris Kristofferson, whose first job in the music business was to sweep the studio in Nashville in which Dylan was recording Blonde On Blonde. Kristofferson said it was like listening to Keats set to music by Mozart. Schatzberg laughs. He got to know Kristofferson when he was briefly involved with the making of the movie A Star Is Born, which he was at one point scheduled to direct. "I brought Barbra Streisand into it. When I first met him Kristofferson he knew I'd photographed Dylan. He was going on and on about him, and rightly so."

One of Schatzberg's most memorable portraits of Dylan made the cover of Blonde On Blonde: the musician's hair looking as if he had been electrocuted, a chequered scarf thrown around his neck. He was photographed outdoors, where the Chelsea meat market once was, in a part of New York that today is dominated by art galleries.

"I think I managed to capture what is special about his personality," Schatzberg has said. "Out of all the photos I took that day, he chose the one with the imperfect focus, the one that is slightly hazy. People have been trying to analyse that photo for years - in fact, I lost the negative and had to reconstitute it digitally. Some thought the blur was the expression of an LSD trip. The explanation is much simpler: it was very cold, hence the scarf round his neck, and we were shivering."

Blonde On Blonde marked a watershed in Dylan's life and career. A double album, it confirmed his move away from acoustic folk music and his affinity with rock and roll. "That's my sound" was how he summed it up. A year earlier, Schatzberg had been with Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival,when he shocked the crowd by strapping on an electric guitar. For his perceived treachery Dylan was jeered and vilified. How did he react? "He was furious," says Schatzberg. "I don't care,' he said, I'm going to do it.' And he did. And he was right."

Few artists, I say, have been as single-minded as Dylan. Fewer still have had the courage to turn their backs on their fans and pursue their own course. "I can relate to that," says Schatzberg. "I'm pretty stubborn myself. I like to get what I want."

He last saw Dylan to talk to in the 1970s, at a mutual friend's wedding. Dylan, he recalls, asked him how he made the transition from taking photographs to making movies. Then as now, he said that it was simply because he had a story to tell and there was no other way to tell it. After Puzzle Of A Downfall Child, which is about a fashion model recovering from a nervous breakdown, he never intended making any more movies. Lately, he says, he has started taking photographs again, most recently of the French actor Guillaume Canet.

He has lost touch with Dylan, but went to see him in concert a couple of years ago. How was it? "I hated it. Well, you know, he's always been a little disrespectful to the audience. When he was doing his really great stuff it was all right to be disrespectful, because the stuff is great. But when you only do one or two recognisable tunes and you don't pay any attention to the audience, it gets boring. The audience, they're all standing and cheering and smoking dope and all that, and after three numbers half of them fall asleep. Then he picks up his harmonica and they start cheering. And he's not a great harmonica player. He's an artist who's done great, great work, and he could keep the legend going if he would only give the audience a little bit of what they want."

He says it more in sorrow than in anger. Or in expectation. For, as Jerry Schatzberg knows better than most, artists like Bob Dylan don't look back.

Thin Wild Mercury: Photographs Of Bob Dylan by Jerry Schatzberg is at Proud Galleries, 32 John Adam Street, London, WC2N 6BP, from November 21 to January 25