Bob Dylan stood on the verge of many changes in the early summer of 1964. Though he was in the midst of breakthroughs in songwriting and performance, transformations of personal and sartorial style, breakups and new affairs, he hadn’t made those breaks yet.

He had not yet transformed his work or his look; he was not yet Suze Rotolo’s, let alone Joan Baez’s, ex-boyfriend, or the humiliator of Phil Ochs, or a crony of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones at the top of the pop charts.

At the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan was still the biggest star and he still appeared at the topical song workshop because that’s where he belonged. In Woodstock, though, he rode his Triumph motorcycle—John Sebastian, just turned twenty and looking innocent enough that he could pass for fifteen, seated behind him—or sat in the town’s only coffeehouse for hours, and was never accosted by the public.

In Greenwich Village, back in New York City, Dylan and his friends—Sebastian again, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott—still cavorted among themselves in the street, hung out in the Village’s many coffeehouses and browsed through its shops without being besieged by fans.

Not much later, Dylan began posing for portraits by the photographer Daniel Kramer, sometimes in settings similar to the photos gathered here. But by then, his cycle of transformation had more visible results.

Part of Dylan’s breakthrough consists of the image Kramer’s photographs define: A slimmer Dylan, with longer hair that seems to have been electrified, and with a complicated look in his eyes—knowing, damaged, stoned, abandoned, thoughtful—that nevertheless seems carefully calculated.

The Dylan of June and July 1964 caught in Douglas Gilbert’s photographs, unseen these past four decades, behaves much more casually.

It is not so much that Gilbert’s pictures reveal more spontaneity. Dylan was never all that spontaneous when there were people like writers and photographers around. He had come from Minnesota in 1960 bearing a set of composed identities, and in a sense, he spent the next few years mixing elements of each of them.

If he told interviewers nothing but fables about his background, remember that every fable contains a substantial component of truth. Dylan’s prolific imagination and quick wit made the act of constructing an identity that much more complex.

The photographs of Douglas Gilbert show a Dylan that no other pictures from the period capture. In a proverbial garret, known around town as “The White Room,” above the Café Espresso on Tinker Street, he sits down at his portable typewriter and clacks away for the camera. He wasn’t bluffing. Gilbert read a little of what had been typed while Dylan was away from the desk. Later, when Dylan’s next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, came out, he realized Dylan had been working on the liner notes.

His ability to write for publication while being scrutinized by a photographer isn’t all that remarkable—it wouldn’t surprise anyone who’s ever written in a newspaper city room or, for that matter, who’s ever considered that “All the tired horses in the sun / How’m I gonna get any ridin’ done,” the telling couplet that opens Dylan’s 1970 album Self Portrait, might be a pun.

But no sooner does Dylan get going than he’s interrupted—the people who live downstairs, their kids and John Sebastian arrive. Soon, they’re all lolling on the bed on the other side of the room, the grinning Dylan not at the group’s center but in its midst.

As his public, we only saw slices of Dylan’s life. We saw them consecutively and presumed that all that we didn’t see wasn’t present.

More than that, we assumed that the things that we once saw and no longer could see had disappeared. When the protest songs stopped, so did the involvement with the civil rights movement. (That’s clearly untrue.) When the love affair with Baez stopped, the one with Suze Rotolo ended. (Just as clearly wrong.)

When he left home, he became a self-indulgent bohemian with no time for quotidian middle-class life, ’til later when he rebelled against the consequences of his fame. (You can’t make that case anymore, either.)

We weren’t wrong so much as we just didn’t have enough information to put it all together. Which Bob Dylan kept saying, not that anyone believed him.

These pictures make me believe him.

He doesn’t look resentful. He doesn’t look relieved. He doesn’t look bored and he above all doesn’t look distracted. He looks like a man at his ease in the world he inhabits.

Which is 180 degrees from how he looks in Kramer’s photographs. There, he looks in command, on the cutting edge, ready for any adventure. Here, he’s more like Woody Guthrie in that scene from Bound for Glory, where the original rambling man confesses: “I been a-lyin’ to my own self now for a good long time, sayin’ I didn’t want no little house and alla that.”

Dylan’s not lying to himself—in a way, that part about the lying is where he parts company with Woody Guthrie, politically, artistically, and personally. But he doesn’t disagree with Woody on the rest of it. He wants this kind of comfort. He wants the other stuff, too—fame, respect, command of his environment and art, no question.

Douglas Gilbert’s pictures don’t change Bob Dylan’s history, but they seriously adjust it. These photographs suggest that the family man Dylan became—the one who, according to his son Jakob, “never missed a single Little League game I had. He’s collected every home-run ball I ever hit”—had been waiting all along.

Our sense of Dylan in the 1960s is that he lived every day at an extreme—of isolation or socialization, or both. But these pictures suggest that, maybe, instead of describing the young Dylan as purely mercurial, capable of whipping right around from Blonde on Blonde to John Wesley Harding to Nashville Skyline, we ought to see him as someone who was many contradictory things at once: roving bohemian, young folk idealist, rock ’n’ roller on the make, poet, jokerman, romantic magpie, attentive lover, budding family man.

As complicated as anyone else, maybe more so, but not out of human range.