Jim Hair grew up in San Diego, California, and picked up a camera early in life. He has dated his earliest photographs to his 6th grade graduation in 1965. By December 1969, he was already photographing musicians — including a concert featuring David Crosby in San Diego. Through the 1970s, Hair developed a sharp eye for capturing real people in unguarded moments. His black and white portraits are precise and honest, showing the full range of everyday human experience without staging or artifice.
Hair photographed family members just as readily as public figures, artists, and strangers on the street. His grandmother and grandfather appear in portraits from 1971, two of his earliest dated works from that decade.
By 1972, Hair was working in Santa Cruz, where he photographed Page Smith — a historian and co-founder of the University of California, Santa Cruz. The following year, 1973, became one of his most prolific periods. He moved across California and the Pacific Northwest, building a portrait series that ranged from academics and activists to nuns and street performers.
Among his 1973 subjects was Angela Davis, the activist and academic who had just concluded a high-profile trial earlier that year. Hair also photographed Wynn Bullock, the renowned American photographer known for his meditative work at Point Lobos — a location Hair visited himself that same year.
Hair’s 1973 work wasn’t limited to portraits of the well-known. He photographed ordinary people with equal attention — a man in a hat on a Santa Cruz street, street workers mid-task, and a boy caught mid-air in a moment of play. Each frame holds the same weight, whether the subject is a military officer or a child leaping off the ground.
Hair also turned the camera on his own family during this period. His grandfather appears again in a 1973 portrait, and a self-portrait with both grandparents places Hair directly inside the frame alongside his subjects — a personal gesture that sets these family images apart from the rest of the series.
In 1974, Hair traveled to Patzcuaro, Mexico, where he documented local residents — children pushing carts, a couple with a baby, a girl outside a corner store, and men moving through the town carrying heavy loads. These images from Mexico sit alongside his California work from the same year, which included portraits of Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist and social scientist, and master gardener Alan Chadwick photographed in Covelo.
By 1975, Hair was back in San Diego. That year’s photographs pull from a wide range of settings — Balboa Park, a local mission, and street scenes featuring jugglers, mimes, and performers. He photographed Dr. John during a San Diego show and captured portraits of his own mother that same year. The 1975 work carries the same directness as his earlier portraits, with black and white tones giving each face a quiet intensity.
The final years of the decade brought more family portraits and location-specific work. Hair photographed his Aunt Velma in 1977. In 1978, he captured a firefighter on the job in La Jolla and sat down with Jack Stauffacher, the San Francisco printer and typographer known for his work in fine press printing.
