Columbia Calling: The incredible story of Don Hunstein, Columbia Records' in-house photographer

From the early 1950s to the 1980s, Columbia Records’ studios hosted a selection of the world’s best musicians, with legends like Janis Joplin, Tony Bennett, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Johnny Cash and Simon and Garfunkel strolling along its corridors and recording songs that would go on to become some of the pillars of modern music. Goddard Lieberson, president of Columbia Records from 1956 to 1971 was clever enough to recognise the cultural history that was being made on the premises and decided to hire an in-house photographer who could document his musicians at work. That man was Don Hunstein, and he worked at Columbia from 1955 until 1986, amassing an archive of over 100,000 photos. We wanted to talk to Don about his career, his ability to capture the artists as they would want to be perceived, and the things he learnt along the way. When we got in touch through his site though, his wife DeeAnne replied saying that unfortunately Don has Alzheimer’s disease and would not be able to take part in the interview. She then added that she had been married to Don since the mid-1960s and would happily tell us everything we wanted to know of his career through her own eyes. DeeAnne Hunstein lives in New York and runs her own music management company, in between caring for Don at home and being his biggest fan. She met Don when she was 26-years-old shortly after arriving in New York with the intention to become a music writer. “I started to going to a soirée that was held every Friday at the home of a man who published something called The American Record Guide. It had been suggested that I could meet people there in the music world, and one of the people I met was Don. I didn’t get a job out of it, but I could say I got a long-term marriage. From the moment we met we just knew that it was meant to be.” After they were married Don and DeeAnne set off to London for their honeymoon where they famously spent time larking around and photographing the young and exciting Simon and Garfunkel. “They were running around Hyde Park with capes flying around them and there were a couple of famous pictures of them taken that day that ended up on album covers. That was the beginning of our honeymoon, then we went on to France and spent our first week there – paid for by Columbia Records of course!” It sounds idyllic but DeeAnne insists that at the time Don’s job wasn’t seen as especially glamorous, despite him hanging out with the likes of Johnny Cash, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, Tony Bennett and some of the most iconic jazz musicians in history on a day-to-day basis. “He was a working photographer,” DeeAnne said. “It was only after David Hemmings did Blow Up that suddenly being a photographer became glamourised, but before that he wasn’t a celebrity. People knew him and they liked him but he was always in his working clothes: we would go along to these fancy receptions and he was just in his jeans, carrying his photo bag.” This wallflower nature allowed Don to photograph in a unique way. “He knew when not to be obtrusive. A lot of people see photographers as being invasive of their space and they don’t want them around, but Don knew how to be very discreet and would never make them feel that they were being pushed in any way. He was always so funny and full of jokes and humour so people just loved having him there. He put them at ease.” This easygoing personality and ability to make everyone laugh led Don to be invited into the New York apartment of the up-and-coming Bob Dylan. Don hung out with Bob and snapped away while he smoked cigarettes, played his guitar on his bed, messed around with his girlfriend Suze Rotolo and tried on a number of different hats. His photos would go on to be the stuff of legend, particularly the shot of Dylan and Rotolo cuddled up together on a frozen New York street, eventually used as the cover for Dylan’s groundbreaking album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. “That’s why he was able to capture the essence of people, because they weren’t putting on airs or pretending to be more glamorous or more important than they were,” DeeAnne told us. “Don always said ‘They’re just people to me. I didn’t care that they were famous or they were celebrities, I wanted to get to know them.’ He wasn’t fawning all over them because they were so great. People like Johnny Cash or Miles Davis were notorious for being difficult with other people, but not with Don.” From the late 1950s onwards Don was photographing Johnny Cash in the Columbia studios, documenting his journey from country music poster boy through his much-publicised fall from grace, and slow climb back to global fame. Cash, who notoriously – and sometimes violently – spurned journalists and photographers, got on so well with Don that he invited him back to his farm where Don captured him most at ease, fishing with his family on a canoe or tuning his guitar in his wood-panelled living room. Sometimes Don’s photos have such an unobtrusiv