The Dead Come Alive: Bob Minkin’s Live Photos of the Grateful Dead
Stories behind the longtime Dead chronicler’s iconic images from the 1970s to today

Jerry Garcia performing at the Shoreline Ampitheatre in June 1990.
Bob Minkin
Forty years ago, photographer Bob Minkin saw his first Grateful Dead-related show, a Jerry Garcia Band gig at the Capitol Theater in New Jersey. Luckily for fans and historians, Minkin, then a high school student in Brooklyn, began carting along a camera to take souvenirs of shows he attended. By the late Seventies, he was shooting professionally, and by the time Garcia died in 1995, Minkin had caught and shot hundreds of Dead and Garcia shows. Minkin's new book, Live Dead: The Grateful Dead (available at bookstore and here), compiles his work from the 1970s to the present, and Minkin shared some of the stories behind the shots.