jay blakesberg

Jay Blakesberg is a San Francisco based rock and roll photographer and film maker, whose work appears regularly in numerous publications, including Rolling Stone, Guitar Player, Relix and Acoustic Guitar to name a few. He has photographed The Grateful Dead, Jane's Addiction, Counting Crows, Phish, Nirvana, the Rolling Stones, R.E.M., John Lee Hooker, Tom Petty, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, Ben Harper, Flaming Lips, Carlos Santana, Tom Waits, and Kronos Quartet to name just a few. Over the last 25 years Blakesberg's photography has been included in over 200 CD packages for Virgin, Reprise, EMI, Columbia, Warner Bros., Arista Records as well as many indie record labels. He has also published seven coffee table books of his photography - Between the Dark and Light: The Grateful Dead Photography of Jay Blakesberg, To Defy the Laws of Tradition: A Photographic Archive of Primus & Les Claypool, Waking up with a Placebo Headwound, Images of The Flaming Lips by Jay Blakesvberg and J. Michelle Martin, Traveling on A High Frequency which is a 30 year retrospective of Jay’s work, as well as books on The Mother Hips and one on various artists for First Act Guitars of Boston, and “Jam” – featuring ALL live concert photography was just  published in October 2013.
 
Jay has directed short form video projects for Jackie Greene, Nicki Bluhm, ALO, Tim and Nicki Bluhm, Kronos Quartet, and moe. as well as directed hundreds of sets of multi-camera live concert video for artists including Gov’t Mule, The Dead, Widespread Panic, Flaming Lips, REM, Galactic, Drive By Truckers, Yonder Mtn String Band, String Cheese Incident, Michael Franti and Spearhead and Phil Lesh & Friends just to name a few.
 
Over the last 7 years Jay has photographed and or produced/directed the video for numerous US music festivals including Newport Folk Festival, Mountain Jam, Gathering of The Vibes, Summer Camp Music Festival, moe.down, Echo Festival, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and several others.
 
Currently Jay is working on a documentary series of short films on prominent rock music poster artists.
 
Artists Jay has recently photographed for Magazine features/covers and artists themselves for CD packaging, or publicty uses include Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell, Tea Leaf Green, Josh Redman, Phil Lesh, Yonder Mtn String Band, Peter Rowan, Jorma Kaukonen, The Avett Brothers, Bob Weir, moe., Jackie Greene, ALO, Chris Robinson, Spearhead and many others.
 
Jay continues to connect with record labels, music technoloogy companies, magazines, and artists to create engaging and relevant content that can be shared across multiple platforms in the ever expanding digital world we live in!