The Photographic Journal

Jay & Ricki Blakesberg

Interview 081 • Mar 16th 2023

Foreword

Music, fashion, and pop culture have always been ways to bring people together. Photography serves as a visual representation of those connections, chronicling a moment in time.

Jay and Ricki Blakesberg have worked to curate a retrospective collection, RetroBlakesberg, that serves as a visual bridge between Gen X and younger generations. The collection documents Jay's work offering Millennial and Gen Z viewers a unique perspective on culture and society as it was from the 70s all the way to the present.

It's often said that the relationship between a photographer and their subject is something special. But in this case, the connection between two photographers – a father and daughter working together, is magic.

This interview has been edited for clarity and content.

Interview

Jay, did you discover anything about your own work from the way that Ricki edited the book together?

Jay Blakesberg

There are images in the book that I might not have chosen that she chose, but I think that she had this broader vision, which gave me a broader vision, you know, I sort of can easily get tunnel vision into my greatest hits.

Right.

Jay

And shoots that I resonate to. So it was nice to revisit things that were fresh to her and maybe overlooked by me. And then I come back, I’m like, "oh yeah, I really do like that shot," or, you know, at the end of the day, she really did pick 99% of the photos. I mean, there might be two or three shots in there that I rallied for. But in general, it was her that was picking everything. And then when I saw it, as a collection, this new feeling emerged also for me.

And what was that new feeling?

Jay

The new feeling was that, especially when I went back and looked at a lot of the stuff from my early days, the high school stuff, I felt pretty good about it. Because those photographs were taken when I was 16 years old, and we didn’t have a camera where you can take a picture and then, look on the back of the camera body and figure it out. "Oh, it’s too light, it’s too dark. It’s too this. It’s too that." We actually had to figure out the technical and the creative side all through osmosis and trial and error.

Mhmm.

Jay

And so, to look back and I, of course, I wish there was more of it, but to look back at pictures that I took when I was 16 years old from a concert, which is not always an easy thing, to shoot Bob Dylan or Neil Young or something like that, and I have pictures that are actually in focus and exposed properly, I felt good. And I was proud of that work. I felt like, "here’s the beginning of my journey."

Mhmm.

Ricki Blakesberg

Something that was exciting about this for both my dad and I was, when I was digging through the archive and pulling these photos out, it was like he said, a lot of photos that he hasn’t looked at in a really long time. And it wasn’t just about the concert photography. We were reliving these moments in his high school bedroom, where it felt like very much like the 70s and having this nostalgia of things that the teens and kids are still doing today. So I thought it was a cool duality to see all the stuff that Jay was doing and being able to capture that time and basically bring it back to life.


Well for you, Ricki, did you, were there things that surprised you, different from the things that surprised your dad?

Ricki

Totally. RetroBlakesberg started as an Instagram.

Right.

Ricki

And so a huge process at the beginning was learning my dad’s archive through posting on the Instagram and immediately when I started I was just so surprised by how vast his archive was and how much stuff he’s shot. I think that I placed my dad in this bubble of, like, Grateful Dead, Phish, etc. I placed him in this bubble and when I started going through his archive, I realized that there were bands ranging from like the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Bjork, but also he was taking lifestyle shots and capturing the fashion in the moment and also the energy that people were feeling, and representing what the 70s and 80s and 90s and early 2000s were like. That’s what really surprised me. I think that I didn’t realize how much my dad captured.

(chuckles) Yeah, like how much he actually been around for.

Ricki

Yeah, I also think that it was the first time that I really had thought about my dad is an artist. For so long I just like, "he’s a rock photographer," and what does that mean? And then I started looking at this work and realized, this is art and this should be showcased in more of an artistic way than my dad is used to presenting.


Jay, have you thought of yourself that way? Do you think of yourself as an artist or as a craftsman?

Jay

I think of myself as a visual anthropologist, anthropology defined as the study of human kind. When I was growing up I shot my friends, right, these are the people I was hanging out with and we didn’t have the internet to inform us, we spoked pot, we drank alcohol, we’ve snorted substances that we probably shouldn’t have that people told us we were good things to do. We went and saw concerts, we listened to vinyl records, we stayed out late at night. We partied in the woods and we partied in my bedroom, and I photographed that.

Right.

Ricki

It’s like a different type of street photography, almost, like this different look of street photography. Like you were capturing these moments while they were happening.

Jay

And then by the time I get to the late 80s, I realized that I’m an adult and I got to start paying my bills and and so, can I do that as a photographer? Up until then I’ve been photographing hippies and deadheads in that environment, but the magazines that were hiring me weren’t necessarily interested in the Grateful Dead. They were interested in Pearl Jam and Soul Asylum and the Chili Peppers and Jane’s Addiction. And there was this new alternative rock that was exploding out of our country, starting in ’87, ’86-’87, ’88. And I was photographing a lot of that. So all of a sudden I’m shooting goth kids, or punk kids or stage divers or moshers, you know. So one night, I might be photographing somebody diving off the stage into a swimming crowd of people with a lot of angst and that energy, and the next week I might be photographing flowing beautiful flower hippie girls in skirts at a Grateful Dead concert. And so, to me, that’s visual anthropology.

Right.

Jay

You know, you know, there’s the modern-day hippie movement or the modern hippie tribe. There’s the alternative rock tribe and back then, they were very, very separate; today, they’re much more meshed together, just because people have bigger ears and are more open to listening to all sorts of different music and crossing those genres. Whereas back then, if you listen to the Grateful Dead, you probably didn’t listen to the Butthole Surfers, for the most part. Nowadays people listen to Snoop Dogg and the Grateful Dead, and The Allman Brothers, and John Mayer, you know.

Right.

Jay

I’m shooting these different tribes and I was this bridge because there weren’t a lot of people that had their toes dipped in both worlds, but I was doing the alt-rock stuff because I was engaged in it and it really turned me on. The energy in those rooms was palpable and incredible, just like it was in a tent show and I’m glad I was there to take pictures of it and document it because, again, just like the hippies are at these shows dancing and there’s no cell phones and those pictures. There’s no cell phones in these photos where people are stage-diving either. So they’re stage-diving not to be on Instagram tomorrow or TikTok, their stage diving because that was what they were doing in that moment.



At the time, was it very natural for you to switch from photographing the Dead and everyone that followed them to the more, you know, angst-ridden energetic groups of the late 80s?

Jay

But I could feel the importance of the moment that I was documenting with those bands and a lot of that it is just showing up, you know, there were bands that I was going to shoot and shows that I was going to shoot, not necessarily on assignment for a magazine, but because I felt like it was important to document it. And now I go back and I look at the stuff and it’s 30 years later and I’m like, "fuck, I’m really happy that I went out that Tuesday night or that Wednesday night, Thursday, night, or all three in a row and did that, when I had the energy."

The Chili Peppers, the first time I shot them, those are from 1987, right. If you were 23 years old at that show that night, you’re 55 years old today.

(laughter)

Jay

Okay, let that sink in for a second.

I’d rather not (laughter)

Jay

(laughter) Me either! These moments in time where if you’re not into rock and roll, they mean nothing to you. But if you’re into rock and roll, and the pop culture, you’re interested in being part of, or understanding, or reading about or learning about it, or you’ve been a part of it, it means everything to you.

Right.

Ricki

Well I also think, just in an addition to that dad, part of me disagrees, I also feel like a lot of this book embodies this idea of, like, even if you’re not obsessed with rock and roll, it’s still something that really excites the youth.

That was a lot of like the ethos and intention for me behind RetroBlakesberg, the Instagram, and the book is that I wanted a younger generation to experience these photographs. You don’t necessarily have to be the biggest Deadhead or the biggest Chili Peppers fan. But seeing these images excite you, and make you want to learn more. And I’ve noticed the following that I have on RetroBlakesberg is really different than what my dad’s following is (on his personal Instagram), it is a younger generation of people who feel really excited by this era.

You see it in how kids are dressing these days, where people are wearing clothes that kids were wearing in the 80s and 90s. So I feel like this book isn’t all about just the 55 year-olds who were at that show. It’s also about the 20 year-old who wants to know what that experience was like.


For you Ricki, did your concept of what you wanted the book to be change as you’re putting it together?

Ricki

My dad probably tried to change it a couple times (chuckles) but no, I feel like I had an intention from the beginning. I think that the Instagram has evolved a lot and I’ve narrowed in on what I think people like to see. That was a driving factor of a lot of the images that I chose for the book.

Jay

I think the one thing that changed once I saw what Ricki was curating, was that that’s when I decided I wanted to go in and write those essays at the beginning of each decade. We didn’t start this book saying, "this is going to be my visual autobiography." People always say, "write your story, write your story, you’ve had such an interesting life," and I never felt like...when we first started this book, that wasn’t part of the plan. You know, we were like, "yeah, maybe we will do some short captions," but then, as I saw how she was curating the book and paginating the book I was like, "okay, this necessitates me telling this story and this is the time and the place." So that was one of the big things that evolved out of it.

Did that create a tension for you Ricki?

Ricki

Me and him butted heads because I was really passionate about certain things that I knew that I wanted.

Jay

But you didn’t care when I said I wanted to start doing the text.

Ricki

Oh no no no, I liked it. I thought it was great, and I thought that it brought this level of excitement from my dad that maybe initially wasn’t there. I could see him reliving these memories, going back and thinking about these moments throughout his life. So I actually feel that brought us together in the book a lot more and got him way more excited about this idea of RetroBlakesberg.

What was your initial goal when you were putting the book together?

Ricki

Yeah, there was a wider scope, I have had a lot of goals with, with RetroBlakesberg, and it continues to grow. My dad has done a good job of reaching a specific market and I really wanted people in my generation to experience these photographs. I designed this book with my best friend from college, who is also my age, and I feel like I was trying to bring in this younger generation to, like I said, to experience this. I’m in grad school right now for art business and I have goals of wanting to work in galleries and stuff like that. So, I’m trying to figure out these ways to intertwine my dad’s visual anthropology of work into this art market. What does that look like and how does it look to bring this younger generation to viewing his photographs. And honestly, I learn about so many photographers from like The Photographic Journal. I feel like that’s why this excites me so much.

Oh, thank you. Glad to hear that.

Ricki

So for me, that was a big goal of mine.



Jay, as you were considering yourself more of a serious photographer,  what did you do in order to improve your own craft?

Jay

Well, I mean...

Because you were self-taught, right?

Jay

Yes, there were several things. So the first thing for me was, you know, I started out in terms of music, being a concert photographer, shooting live bands on stage. And if you remember magazines from the old days, remember those things that had a lot of pages in them and pictures on them?

Ah yes, my mother spoke of them.

Jay

If you picked up pretty much any magazine, you know, people talk about music magazines.

Sure.

Jay

They always had a portrait on the cover, not a performance shot, and then you’d open up to the story and there’d be a portrait as the lead photo, full page, page and a half, two page spread, and then they’d flip the page and there’d be another portrait that was yea big. And then you get to the next page and there was a live shot that was this big, right.

(chuckles) right.

Jay

And that’s where I fit in. And so I quickly realized that if I actually wanted to get more real estate on pages of magazines and also perhaps shoot magazine covers, and it was the same thing for albums, CDs. Most of the time it was portraits or candid shots, off-stage things. I needed to figure that out. And so I bought my first Hasselblad out of the classified section of the San Francisco Chronicle, bought some studio lighting, and taught myself how to use it. Because I knew that if I wanted to get a magazine cover, I couldn’t just shoot in 35mm, I needed to shoot in medium format.

Sure.

Jay

And I needed to shoot with lighting. And you can’t just set up lights and be like, "okay, here I am." You actually need to figure out how to be creative with those lights. And so I taught myself how to light and I shot things that turned me on. I mean, for a long time, I didn’t shoot a lot of color film because it almost bored me for some reason. It was almost too plain, too vanilla. And then when I started experimenting with harder lighting, and maybe doing some cross processing of film and coming up with my blue look you see in the in the book.

Right.

Jay

I started to go back, gravitate towards color again, and so it was this constant evolving. And then the other thing is, when you get hired by an art director or a photo editor to do an assignment, you might be going to shoot Iggy Pop, and Iggy Pop says, "okay, you have 15 minutes to do this magazine cover." The photo editor doesn’t want to hear that you only have 15 minutes. They want you to come back with the brilliant photo.

Do we always come back with a brilliant photo? No, but if you don’t come back with the brilliant photo time and time again, why would that art director, photo editor, hire you again? So there are all these motivating factors to be able to create interesting, engaging photographs, when you’re shooting portraits, certainly, because you want to come back with the brilliant photo or at least try to, right, we don’t always succeed at that but we’re trying to.

And so the way you do that in my world was taking risks, right. Got to take some risk. No risk, no reward.


Right.

Jay

All of those things force you to be more creative, and to hopefully make those things work. And the way that you get inspired to do those things as you go pick up things like Vanity Fair, or Vogue or Irving Penn’s coffee table book, or the Richard Avedon book, or the Lee Friedlander book, whatever it might be. And you take all of that history and you absorb it all and you spit it, you know, in this ear out that ear, and it comes in Richard Avedon, and it comes out Jay Blakesberg here, right? And I’m not saying I’m Richard Avedon...

(chuckles)

Jay

Were there particular photographers that you gravitated towards as sources of inspiration?

Jay

I’m a huge Avedon fan but I think back then, when I was in the thick of doing two and a quarter portraits all the time, Irving Penn was probably my biggest inspiration in terms of doing portrait work. Of course you love Annie Leibovitz because she’s shooting celebrities and she’s shooting musicians and stuff like that. And then of course, you get to people that are more contemporary like Mark Seliger or Frank Ockenfels.

Yeah, we’ve definitely heard of them.

Jay

David Bailey and Albert Watson, Timothy White. When I was just starting to blossom and get assignments to shoot magazine covers or CD packages and feature stories, you know, those were the people; Matthew Rolston, Annie Seliger, that were getting all the magazine covers. They were like the big names of the late 80’s, early 90’s.

All that stuff inspired me and I used to get magazines and I’d tear pages out of other people’s photos and stick them in a file, and if I was going out to do a portrait of a band that had five people in it, I might go look through that file and say, let me look at some photos that have five people in it, see how Seliger did it, or see how Albert Watson did it.

Ricki

That’s something that I my dad and I bond over a lot too, we’re constantly sending each other photographers that we find or that we love. That’s a huge gift that my dad will always give me, presents of prints that I really love and books and stuff like that. We just love sharing that knowledge with each other.

Ricki, were there particular photo books that inspired you when you were putting this one together?

Ricki

Yeah, actually there’s this Instagram called The Family Acid. It’s a daughter who runs her father’s archive. He’s this amazing photographer and she was a huge point of inspiration for me for RetroBlakesberg and archival work in general. My dad and I actually got into contact with her over the last few years and we’ve exchanged emails and whatnot but that was a huge, huge inspiration for me. And she made a book, so I pulled from that. I also had worked on a book, with my dad, prior, with another photographer who had passed away named Neal Casal.

I drew inspiration for the designer that I worked with from there. I like stuff that’s like a little bit cleaner and it’s more about the photography as opposed to a lot of design and stuff happening around it. So that was a huge point of inspiration. I spend time looking through different photo books I love going to photo galleries.

For me, I don’t like to have a whole bunch of text next to the photograph. I really like for a person to experience the photograph first and then have the option to go read the story later so that they can like draw their own meanings from it. And then know, "okay, well I can go read about the photo and actually like see who it is, where it’s from, and delve a little bit more into that story.

A question we have yet to ask any other photographer, do you think that psychedelics had any influence on your work?

Jay

100%. I think that psychedelics have a huge influence on me as an artist, a photographer, a human being, a person. I think that for a while there, I shot too much, too many bands with a fisheye lens because I think it gave me that symmetrical, rounded, psychedelic...I don’t know if you’ve ever taken psychedelics. I don’t know if you know what I’m talking about.

Once, once or twice or ten times.

Jay

(chuckles) So, you get the idea of that divine symmetry. I was trying to create some of that divine symmetry in my photographs, with curved fisheye lenses and colorful lighting and things like that. But I think yeah, absolutely. I mean, if psychedelics don’t inspire and push to the forefront some of the creativity that you’re looking for, as an artist, as a photographer, then then you’re missing out on something and you need to tap into a really important resource that can only be helpful, as a visual person.



Nice. Ricki, as a photographer, how do you think having a photographer as a father influenced your own creative journey?

Ricki

I think about that a lot. I’ve always been super into photography and I think obviously that comes from my dad and just going out with him and taking pictures. The type of pictures I like to take are really different, I don’t really like music photography, I love street photography but that’s also something that my dad loves to do, especially when we travel. So I’m sure that I subconsciously draw inspiration from that, but more than that, I appreciate that so much of my love and passion for photography comes from all the things that my dad has taught me, whether it’s subconscious or conscious, we’re just always in conversation about art and it’s really special that my dad and I are able to have those conversations and that he’s excited to learn from me and I’m excited to learn from him about it.

What kind of things do you think you’ve taught him?

Ricki

Through RetroBlakesberg, I’ve taught him that his older photographs are really important artifacts to society and that they should be shown and also that there’s a certain aesthetic that I like and that I want him to start taking more of...I like his older photography more than I like his newer photography and I’m very honest about that with him.

Jay

She’s an analog girl!

Ricki

Yeah, I just love film, and I would love for him to start shooting some, but I don’t know if he ever would again, but my dad would always help me with projects when I was a major in school with photography, and we would have so much fun taking various film photos. Whether it was with a huge Polaroid camera, a 4x5 Camera. I’ve taught him about more of a fine art perspective and a lot about art galleries and museums and curation.

And what kind of things do you think you’ve learned from Ricki, Jay?

Jay

She turns me on to stuff like I turn her on to stuff, she’ll send me an Instagram page, maybe she’ll find something online and send it to me. We both do that, so discovery more than anything else. We do converge on very similar things. We both like analog, we both like street photography, we both like black and white.

I don’t think it’s about teaching each other anything as opposed to inspiring each other to just, you know, eat, sleep, breathe photography.

Ricki, what is it that draws you to curation?

Ricki

I love the act of taking from photos and creating a story with them. I think that there’s something really beautiful about it. There are unique ways to do it and there’s intentional ways to do it. That’s one thing that my dad and I do differently, I will take his images, and I am telling my own story through his stories and I think that’s been a really fun journey, and I did the same thing with the Neil Casal book, I spent a lot of time researching his blogs and his Instagram and his websites, and I was able to sort of tell my own story through that lens. It’s a special thing to be able to do, and I feel really honored that my dad has given me the opportunity to do that with his photographs and the photographs that we’ve started to collect in Retro Photo Archive.



Do you feel like you understand these people better by going through their archives?

Ricki

Totally. Photography is so intimate at times, because you’re really experiencing these moments through this person’s eye. And sometimes that was with Neil in these hotel rooms as a touring musician while he was alone. What does it mean, why was he capturing this, and it can feel like you’re really getting in there.

What kind of story were you trying to tell with Neal’s book?

Ricki

We were trying to tell this story of his life, and especially the circumstances of how he left us. I think a lot of his images are really emotional and sad. And they also just display this solo journey that he had but also moments that he would return back to. He was going to Japan every year for 10 years and in these photographs we would see the same people in these photos from when they’re young to 10 years later. Showing his life and his experiences, and these moments he captured on the road as of traveling musician, and what that looked like.

Jay

Also, you know, for me, when Neil was alive looking at those photographs, you might not have seen the sadness in them. After he was gone, it became apparent in some of the imagery. And some of what he was capturing.

Ricki

The intention of Retro Photo Archive is bringing these archives to life and telling the stories of these photographers who were capturing these pop culture moments that a lot of the world has yet to see.

Is legacy something that you, Jay, have always thought about, or has it come up more as as your career has gone on?

Jay

100% comes up more as your career goes on. So that’s also another aspect of Retro Photo Archive. A lot of photographers never had kids. I don’t know what it is about us, we’re fucking weirdos. So people start to think, where does your work go when you die, right? Some of the stuff that ends up at university libraries, different archives like that, and no offense to any of those places. But most of those places have no idea what to do with it, how to get it out there in the world, how to organize it, how to edit it, how to scan it and a present it.

I felt like if Ricki is going to manage my archive when I’m gone, which I don’t want it to disappear, I want my work to stay out there and stay alive and I’m actively going back through the archive and scanning as much of my stuff as possible and rescanning things that were done on crappy scanners, 25 years ago. Because I’m going to leave Ricki a solid archive to A) manage, B) generate revenue, and I felt like if she was going to do this as a full-time thing, can she make a living just managing my work. And so then I started thinking, well what if we built out this thing called Retro Photo Archive that I was part of and we had five or eight or ten or twelve different archives that spans 1960 to whenever I stop. Because eventually Ricki, whether you like it or not, my digital photos are going to be part of Retro Photo Archive. (laughter)

(laughter)

Ricki

That’s true!

Jay

And so, you know, it gives Ricki an opportunity to have a business that was photo-based, that’s just not me. And there’s other work involved that she can manage and hopefully generate revenue to turn this into a business that is sustainable.

I think that legacy is important. I don’t want my stuff to disappear. And I do think about that at 61 years old...look, I’m not going anywhere, knock on wood, anytime soon, but you know the torch will need to be passed and I’m just happy that I have somebody to pass it to.


What does legacy mean to you, Ricki?

Ricki

Something that’s great about working with him now is understanding what his work means to him and understanding how can I continue to respect that as I slowly start to represent and manage his archive and these other archives. Legacy means making sure that you really care about what you’re taking over.

Alright. And one last question for both of you in turn, we’ll start with you, Jay. We ask this of everyone: which do you prefer as an artist, the process or the result?

Jay

Both.

(chuckles)

Jay

So, when we used to shoot film, and we’d go to the lab and pick it up and put those chromes on a light table or get the proof sheets and look at it through a loop. It turned me on, man.

(laughter)

Jay

You know, like, if you got the shot, it turned me on because if it didn’t, why would I keep fucking doing it, right? That process, it’s beginning to end.

And for you, Ricki as a curator?

Ricki

I just love the process of spending the time with the photographs and creating my own connection with them, especially because it’s not my art. I’m taking the art and creating a different type of art around it. Finding the photos I like, discovering photos and like, holy shit, I can’t believe you’ve never shown me that before. Like what is this, what is this doing not being shown to the world, that gets me so excited and I can’t wait to share it and post about it or put it in a book.

Alright, I think that the covers it, guys!

Jay

Thank you.

Ricki

Thank you so much!

Thank you!


“Jay Blakesberg’s solo museum retrospective, RetroBlakesberg Captured on Film: 1978-2008, will be on display for the first time on the west coast at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, CA in the fall of 2023.”