Jukebox: The Music Photographs of Michael Goldberg  

July 25-September 22, 2024

The Haight Street Art Center is pleased to present Jukebox: The Music Photographs of Michael Goldberg, a selection of almost 40 photographs drawn from Goldberg’s new book, “Jukebox: Photographs 1967 – 2023.” The show runs from July 25 through September 22, concurrent with We Are the One: San Francisco Punk, 1970s –1980s, which Goldberg curated for the Haight Street Art Center. The public is invited to an opening celebration for both exhibitions on August 2.  

“Good photographs are designed to make you feel like you are ‘there,’ and those are the kind of photographs Michael Goldberg takes,” says Roberta Bayley, who was the chief photographer for Punk magazine, shot all the photographs for her book “Blondie Unseen,” and took the cover photo for the first Ramones album. “His live shots make you feel like part of the audience, while his audience shots make you a member of the band.”  

Goldberg grew up in Marin County, and while most of the photographs in his book and exhibition were taken in San Francisco, the show includes one of his first music photos taken closer to home, of Jim Morrison fronting The Doors on Mt. Tamalpais in June 1967; it was shot when he was just 13.  

In the mid-to-late 1970s and early ‘80s, Goldberg became a music journalist who wrote stories accompanied by his own photographs. These joint efforts appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Berkeley Barb, and other publications. During this period, he photographed Jerry Garcia at the Grateful Dead member’s Larkspur home in 1970, Frank Zappa in his room at the Miyako Hotel in San Francisco in 1975, Michael Bloomfield at his house in the late ‘60s, and Captain Beefheart in the front room of his manager’s apartment in San Francisco in the late ‘70s. These local assignments led to work for national publications such as Creem and Rolling Stone, where he spent a decade as an editor and writer beginning in 1983.  

“I grew up as a fan of such great local music photographers as Herb Greene, Jim Marshall, Annie Leibovitz, and Baron Wolman,” says Goldberg. “I also studied the framing in films by Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and other filmmakers to arrive at my approach to taking photographs.”  

“Michael Goldberg was there and documented it as it happened,” says Laurie Kratochvil, the Director of Photography at Rolling Stone from 1982 to 1994. “Who didn’t he shoot?” asks San Francisco’s own Joel Selvin. “Come for the big names – Stones, Dead, Van, The Band; stay for the beautiful faces from the distant past – Tim Buckley, Professor Longhair, Sal Valentino.”  

Included in the Jukebox exhibition are photographs of Frank Zappa, Emmylou Harris, the Rolling Stones, the Avengers, Bettye LaVette, Van Morrison, Iggy Pop, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Commander Cody, Toots Hibbert of Toots and the Maytals, Peter Tosh, and Professor Longhair. Most of the photos have not been previously seen.