“Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out”

Happy New Year Retro Photo Archive Friends!

This month we are highlighting photographer Ron Rakow and his work throughout the late 60’s and early 70’s.

During the lockdown days of the pandemic, Josh Baron (who works closely with Jay Blakesberg) began interviewing Ron Rakow for a Grateful Dead book project. Rakow is known for co-managing the Grateful Dead in the late '60s, and in the early '70s founding Grateful Dead Records. During the interview, Rakow revealed that when he worked with the Dead, he always carried a Nikon camera - and that he knew how to use it. Rakow claimed to have thousands of unseen and mostly unsorted images, somewhere in storage. After numerous attempts to connect with Rakow and search his space for these alleged archives, Jay was finally able to arrange to meet with Rakow in his southern California storage locker, where he came upon a Holy Grail of unseen photographs from the 1960s and 70s. 

Through Rakow’s lens, we have over 800 never before seen color slides and a few hundred B&W images of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Timothy Leary, the Summer of Love and many other cultural icons and events of the time.

To delve into the world of Rakow and his relationship with Timothy Leary you can read the recent article written by Ricki Blakesberg for The Photographic Journal: Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out!