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Even after decades as one of the Bay Area’s top rock ’n’ roll photographers, Jay Blakesberg still remembers his first time in a darkroom.

It was 1977. Together with a friend, the 14-year-old “Jewish kid from New Jersey” had just gotten back from a Jerry Garcia concert, having shot a roll of black-and-white film. “We developed it and I was hooked,” Blakesberg said in an interview, fondly recalling “that magic liquid chemical soup and watching a picture come up for the first time.”

Forty-six years and countless Fillmore concerts, music festivals and Rolling Stone assignments later, he is the subject of “RetroBlakesberg: The Music Never Stopped,” a solo exhibition of photos and rock ’n’ roll ephemera. The exhibition will run at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco from Aug. 31 through Jan. 28, 2024.

The heart of the exhibition is 200 photographs shot in the Bay Area between 1978 and 2008. They include portraits and concert photos of the Grateful Dead, Paul McCartney, B.B. King, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Tom Waits, David Bowie, Carlos Santana and many more legends. Included in the ephemera — all of it from Blakesberg’s personal collection — is everything from ticket stubs to test Polaroids to magazine tear sheets featuring Blakesberg’s first published photos.

“When I first started taking photos at concerts, my only goal was to create my own memorabilia to tack on my bedroom wall,” Blakesberg said. “My collecting this stuff was my way of adding to that memorabilia. I wasn’t thinking, in 40 years I’m pretty sure the CJM will do a retrospective.”

In addition to the materials on display, the CJM will sponsor activities around the exhibition, including a free Oct. 21 concert featuring several local bands.

From the get-go, Blakesberg had both the eye and the chutzpah to make it as a rock photographer, though it was the music that hooked him first. Growing up in pre-internet 1970s suburbia, he recalled, “If you wanted to be cool, rock ’n’ roll was your way. We went to a lot of concerts. We lived for it. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, except we were too nerdy for sex.”

His first published photo, of former Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen on stage, ran in Relix magazine in 1978, when Blakesberg was just 16.

A year later, while attending an anti-nuclear march and concert in Washington, D.C., he noticed a phalanx of photojournalists taking pictures of actor-activist Jane Fonda while she addressed the crowd.

“I’m looking at the photographers with their long lenses, and I said, ‘Gosh, I wish I could be one,” he recalled. “I found a discarded press pass and before Jane Fonda finished her speech, I was on stage taking pictures of her.”

His love of the Grateful Dead lured him to the Bay Area in 1985, and in no time he was shooting at venues such as the I-Beam in San Francisco, Berkeley Square and the Greek Theatre. He became the house photographer for classic rock station KFOG and landed assignments from magazines such as BAM and, eventually, Rolling Stone, for which he served as the Bay Area photographer. Once he opened his San Francisco studio, Blakesberg added celebrity portraiture to his skill set.

He did experience one serious interruption early in his career. A drug bust at age 19 landed him an eight-month prison sentence. But Blakesberg made the best of it, demanding and being granted permission to hold a Passover seder and a Yom Kippur service while incarcerated at the Youth Correctional Institute at Annandale, New Jersey.

The inspiration to mark Jewish holidays in prison stemmed from his Jewish upbringing in Clark, New Jersey. Years later, Blakesberg sent his children to Brandeis School of San Francisco. In fact, the CJM show’s origins trace back to an Instagram account run by daughter Ricki Blakesberg, in which she posted classic photographs of her dad’s. That led to a book of photographs, which led to the exhibition.

Having a Jewish institution like the CJM host the exhibit is a big deal for him, he said. “San Francisco was the cultural zeitgeist I wanted to be part of,” he said. “The Dead fan base is hugely Jewish. And the greatest Jewish rock ’n’ roll story that ever happened here was Bill Graham.”

He is referring to the Jewish Holocaust refugee who escaped Nazi-occupied Germany, came to America, turned the Fillmore West into a major rock venue and, as a promoter, helped shaped rock and pop music from 1965 until his untimely death in a helicopter crash in 1991. Graham was proud of his Jewish identity,and played a key role in the first public Hanukkah menorah lightings in San Francisco’s Union Square.

“All my work has been based here,” Blakesberg added. “So for the CJM to step up and see it from all angles — the S.F. angle, the Jewish angle, the pop-culture angle — really impressed me.”

Blakesberg is still at it, photographing artists and feeling as inspired by their music today as he was when he started out.

“The live music experience meant something to me,” he said. “Those artists were rebels. We believed in what they were telling us, and we believed in the lyrics. We were learning how to lead our lives by listening to this music.”

“RetroBlakesberg: The Music Never Stopped”

Aug. 31 through Jan. 28, 2024 at Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission St, S.F. Included with museum admission.