Paul Kagan
Biography
Paul Kagan was a San Francisco photographer active in the late-1960s Bay Area rock and underground-press scene, best remembered as an image-maker whose photographs other poster artists built on rather than as a poster designer in his own right. He photographed Country Joe and the Fish in 1966, and those images were used on album covers the following year; his work also appeared in Rolling Stone, the Berkeley Barb, the Berkeley Tribe, and Ramparts. A series of erotic photographs he shot in the late 1960s was incorporated by designers — Victor Moscoso among them — into concert posters. Working with Chet Helms's Family Dog, Kagan also designed a handful of 1968 Avalon Ballroom posters himself, setting his own camera work inside the poster frame. Beyond these traces the biographical record is thin, and this profile does not invent past it.
Why They Matter
Kagan is a reminder that the San Francisco poster look was not only drawn and lettered but also photographed. Where the celebrated Avalon and Fillmore designers worked chiefly in ink and optical color, Kagan came at the poster through the camera — supplying imagery that designers like Moscoso reworked, and occasionally composing a photographic poster himself. His is a supporting role in the scene's visual history, documented mainly through his Family Dog credits and his published photojournalism; much of his life and full body of work remains undocumented in the accessible record.
Notable Works
- FD-127 (Steve Miller Band / Howlin' Wolf / Conqueroo, Avalon Ballroom, July 1968 — his own photographic design)
- 1966 photographs of Country Joe and the Fish used on 1967 album covers
- late-1960s photographs used by Victor Moscoso and other designers in Family Dog / Avalon posters
- photojournalism in Rolling Stone, Berkeley Barb, Berkeley Tribe, and Ramparts