The Mind’s Eye: Ebet Roberts

The Memphis-raised photographer has captured the heart and soul of rock-and-roll for more than four decades.

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About this series: Memphis has played muse over the years to artists across the spectrum, from the music of Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Al Green, and the collective at Stax Records, to the prose of Peter Taylor, Shelby Foote, and John Grisham. Visual artists, too, have been inspired by Memphis, whose look has been described as gritty, dirty, active, eerie, beautiful, and captivating. “The Mind’s Eye” profiles the photographers whose work documents the city. Past stories in the series — featuring Bob Williams, Murray Riss, Saj Crone, Karen Pulfer Focht, Willy Bearden, Jamie Harmon, Brandon Dill, Ziggy Mack, Ernest Withers, Andrea Morales, Houston Cofield, and Tommy Kha — are showcased in our digital archives.

A complete gallery of rock-and-roll photographs — The Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Prince, the Sex Pistols, and more — that accompanied this story on the impressive work of Ebet Roberts can be found in the March 2024 print issue of Memphis Magazine. Go here to buy an issue or subscribe.

“I’d literally just come into my apartment in New York from being on the road and the phone started ringing. It was Dylan’s manager. He said, ‘I know you want to photograph Bob. He wants a photographer in D.C. today. Can you come?

“Bob Dylan was one of my heroes and I’d always wanted to photograph him, so I said, ‘What time does he go on?’ He said ‘Four o’clock this afternoon. Just jump on a shuttle at LaGuardia and I’ll meet you at the backstage gate.

“It was already one o’clock, so I frantically unpacked and repacked my suitcase and ran out the door. When I got to the show, the manager was at the backstage gate and Bob was already performing, but he took me up on stage and it was just amazing. Afterward, he said to bring the pictures to the hotel, so I did. I was really pleased with them, but when [the manager] looked at them he said, ‘God, Bob is going to really hate these.’

“My heart just sank. My hero is going to hate my pictures. So I said, ‘I thought they were really good. What’s wrong with them?’

“He said, ‘Bob hates bright lighting.’

“I said, ‘Why did you have me photograph a daytime show if you wanted dark lighting? There’s not much I can do.’

“I was kind of upset, but I ended up photographing Dylan the next week in New York area shows and at the end of the last show the manager came running out of the dressing room and said, ‘Ebet, he loves the photographs. He loves every single one of them and he wants to meet you.’

“So he took me into the dressing room, and then I had to wait for 45 minutes while Bob had a conversation with Lou Reed. Finally, we got introduced and his eyes lit up, and he said, ‘The photos are great!’”

It’s a pretty good story, and Ebet Roberts has a lot of good stories. She has also taken a lot of great photographs — documenting rock’s most-celebrated heroes, heartthrobs, icons, and punks for more than 45 years. Not bad for a Memphis kid who wanted to be a painter.

Roberts’ own story begins in Europe, where her father, an Air Force brigadier general, was stationed in the 1950s. Roberts was only 10 when he died unexpectedly. Her mother, Cornelia Henning Roberts Kimbrough, returned to her hometown: Memphis. Roberts grew up in Midtown, where she attended and graduated from Hutchison School (then located on Union Avenue) in 1963. After high school, she went off to attend a small junior college in Washington, D.C., where she took an elective drawing class — and something in her clicked.

“That was it,” she says. “I knew I wanted to be an artist. Before that, I hadn’t even contemplated that you could go to school for art. It was a revelation. I came back to Memphis and enrolled at the Memphis Academy of Art, which was a wonderful place. So many good instructors and students.”

Four years later, Roberts graduated with a painting degree and had already begun selling her work. “I decided to get a camera because I kept selling paintings and I wanted to document them,” she says. Then she met photographer Murray Riss, who had just been hired by the academy to start a photography department at the school. “I decided I wanted to learn everything I could about photography,” Roberts says, “so I stayed on an extra year to study with Murray.”

After school, an ill-fated relationship led her to Boulder, Colorado, where Roberts eventually made a decision that would shape the rest of her life.

“I hated Boulder,” she says. “I didn’t meet anyone who had any awareness of art being anything more than a decoration hanging on a wall. Finally, I’d had enough. I announced I was leaving and going to New York. And I just went. I knew one person there, a friend who’d gone to Barnard and had an apartment near Columbia, and she let me move in. I really liked the neighborhood — Riverside Park was a block away, Central Park two blocks away. I still live in the same area, all these years later.”

Roberts soon landed a job at the Guggenheim Museum, which might sound like a dream gig for a young painter. For her, at least, it was not.

“I was sort of doing whatever they needed,” Roberts says. “Sales desk, filing, reception, switchboard. One day, on the switchboard, I disconnected the director from a call, which was not a good thing. I decided I wanted to work less to have more time for my painting, so I quit and started waitressing at night at a jazz club that was in my neighborhood.”

The jazz club was the legendary West End Bar, a Columbia University hangout that was a favorite of Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, and other Beat Generation writers in the 1950s. In the 1960s, it was the unofficial New York headquarters of the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground, led by student activist Mark Rudd. By the early 1970s, it had become a music venue where many of the world’s greatest jazz and blues musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, Doc Cheatham, and Big Joe Turner performed. Heady stuff for a young woman from Memphis.

“It was an amazing job,” Roberts says. “I could work two or three nights a week and support myself. I just served drinks; I didn’t have to serve food. I saw amazing jazz musicians at night, and in the daytime, I painted.”

Still using the Minolta 35-millimeter camera she’d bought in Memphis, Roberts began wandering the streets of New York, taking pictures. “I started doing street photography because I decided I wanted to combine photography with my paintings and drawings,” she says. “My work was large — abstract and figurative — a lot of washes and big brush strokes. I’d done lithography at the art academy and I knew I could combine paintings with photo-lithography.”

In 1975, Roberts applied for and received a scholarship for a two-week summer workshop at Penland School of Craft in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. “I ended up staying for four months,” she says. “They just kept letting me stay, and all I had to do was make art. I was in heaven. I would work all night, and drift back and forth between photography and lithography workshops during the day. It was a pivotal moment.”

When Roberts came back to New York, she found herself gravitating more and more toward photography. Then, a year or so later, a friend asked her for a favor, and the course of her life underwent another tectonic shift.

I had a friend who wanted me to photograph his friend’s band,” Roberts recalls. “It was really the last thing in life I wanted to do. I had no interest whatsoever, but I got talked into it and went down to this little club where my friend’s band was on a bill with a band called Mink DeVille, which was Willy DeVille and five others. Well, I saw them and I just completely loved them.”

DeVille was a charismatic frontman with a face made for the camera — prominent Gallic nose, raw cheekbones, dark, shiny pompadour. His wife, Toots, was a tiny woman with a black bouffant, wearing a black mini-dress. Roberts took some photographs of the duo but wanted more.

“I wanted to follow up on the things I photographed instead of just walking around documenting things, then walking away,” she says. “So I talked to Willy backstage after the show and he said he’d love to be photographed, to just call him. When I called a few days later, he said, “You’ve got to come down to Max’s Kansas City. We’re doing a show and you’ve got to come. And I’m saying, ‘I really want to do it at your house.’”

Shortly thereafter, in January 1977, Roberts ended up going to Max’s, which, despite the name, was actually a club in New York City. “I figured that if I did that, I could then maybe get them to do what I wanted,” she says. “At the show, he and Toots were just amazing. Then I took some pictures of the band backstage and this lady came running over and said, ‘I work for Capitol Records and we just signed Mink DeVille this week and I have to see these photographs.’ I said I wasn’t a photographer and that the photos were for a personal project, and she said, ‘No, no, they’re great! You’ve got to bring them by.’

“So I finally took some prints up to Capitol and they loved them and licensed one for, like, $50 or something. Then they started hiring me. They had the Steve Miller Band and Sammy Hagar and some other acts, and they also hired me to photograph some executives.”

Then the Mink DeVille connection worked its magic again. “I was still doing stuff with Willy and Toots,” she says, “and they began playing CBGB, and it was this whole new world. I’d never seen anything like it. Raw energy … all these people hanging out. I don’t know how to describe the energy. It was musically all over the place, a crazy time, and none of these bands were signed. I wanted to document the people there and so I did — the bands and the people offstage. I felt this obsession with the club. I kept going back.”

CBGB was a dump of a venue with a tiny stage, located in the Bowery district of the East Village. Hilly Kristal, the club’s owner, had one rule: Bands had to play original music, no covers. CBGB stood for “Country Blue Grass and Blues,” but the club famously helped spawn the careers of musicians who were not part of any of those genres, mostly punk and post-punk acts, including Patti Smith, The Ramones, Blondie, The Police, Television, and The Talking Heads. Roberts was there for all of it.

Before long, The Village Voice took notice of the scene, and Roberts found herself in the right place at the right time. “The Voice would want photos of whoever was playing, and the club would say I was there,” Roberts says. “Then the Voice started calling me and asking me to take photographs. It was freelance but my overhead was pretty low and I realized I was beginning to be able to support myself with photography. It was all sort of transitional, because a new manager came in at the West End and fired everybody, so I lost my waitressing job. Even so, I don’t think I started thinking of myself as a photographer for a couple of years.”

Four decades later, naming the prominent musicians Roberts hasn’t photographed is almost easier than naming those she has. The list is incredible: Aretha Franklin, The B-52s, Blondie, The Cars, The Cure, David Bowie, Dire Straits, Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson, Miles Davis, Neil Young, The Police, Prince, The Rolling Stones, The Sex Pistols, Stevie Wonder, The Talking Heads, Tom Petty, Whitney Houston, The Who, Willie Nelson, and so many more.

Her work has appeared in copious national and international publications, and her prints are handled by upscale galleries and still sell regularly to fans and collectors.

What sets Roberts’ work apart? It’s her eye for catching an artist’s inner spark, her sense of knowing when the moment is right, and her undiminished commitment to photography as an art. When speaking of her work or telling a story about a musician, Roberts almost always uses the word “photograph,” rather than “shot” or “picture,” or even “photo.”

“That’s intentional,” she says. “I don’t like the word ‘shoot,’ and ‘picture,’ to me, can mean any visual representation. A photograph stands on its own. I did this workshop in the 1970s with Life magazine photo editor John Loengard,” she says. “He said, basically, ‘I don’t care what you do technically. Don’t let the technique get in the way of the image. Just don’t bring in boring photographs.’ That stayed with me. I always looked for a moment, something decisive.”

So how does she know when the moment is right?

“I have to get out of my head and feel it,” she says. “It’s intuitive and reactive. It’s not happening on a conscious level. If I’m thinking about it, it’s not going to happen. But you know when it happens, and you can’t wait to process it and see if it came out. It’s the same thing with portraits. If I’m trying to change things, it’s not working.”

Roberts’ intuition has served her well. She has a now-celebrated knack for catching “something decisive.” She got her start in something of a golden age, a pre-internet era when photography and music were linked artistically, when magazines like Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Trouser Press, Creem, and others published full-page black-and-white photographs on their covers and inside pages. It was the only way fans could see their favorite musicians up-close.

Photographers such as Roberts became artists in their own right, gaining exclusive access, shooting film with hand-held cameras from a pit down front or from on stage, advancing the roll by hand after each shot, shooting judiciously, knowing that reloading a camera took time away from the performance and could mean missing a special moment. That’s all changed, much to Roberts’ regret.

“In a photo pit these days, you’re in with people using iPhones and point-and-shoot cameras,” Roberts says. “It used to be that you were with only professional photographers. Photography was art, and music was art, and they were inter-connected. You could be creative. Now, the whole business is becoming so corporate. You have 30 seconds to take photographs. It’s just shoot, shoot, shoot. You can’t wait for any kind of magical moment.”

The Covid pandemic also put a halt to much of Roberts’ live concert work for a couple of years. But it brought an odd blessing. “My print sales skyrocketed during Covid,” she says. “And we sold lots of big prints. I don’t know if people were staying home and decorating or feeling nostalgic for live music or what it was. So I got busy with print sales and licensing.”

Now there’s another project on the horizon: a book called Ebet Roberts: New York Punk. “It’s close to done,” Roberts says. “SUNY Press came to me during Covid and asked me to do it. It’s my early punk photographs of the New York music scene — at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City and other venues. I thought I had it ready to go, but then they told me to put them in the order I wanted and that set me back. You have to think about what works visually on a facing page, that sort of thing. It’s a huge project. We’re hoping to get it published by late 2024.”

It’s impossible not to ask Roberts for anecdotes about the people she’s photographed, but difficult to know where to begin. She’s been backstage, in dressing rooms, on tour buses, in hotel rooms, and at parties with the biggest names in music. Every one of her photos has a story behind it, but spilling gossip isn’t her style. If, however, you ask which musician had the most charisma, she has a quick answer: Michael Jackson.

“In 1979, I was hired to go on the road with the Jacksons for a few days,” she says. “I wasn’t a fan at that time but it was a job that I was kind of excited about. I got to New Orleans and they’d called in the National Guard — something about a white guy promoting a Black act. I don’t remember exactly, but things were sort of tense. I’m in the pit and feeling a little nervous because I’m the only white person in the building. But everything went well and after the show, the manager wanted me to meet Michael. His quiet energy almost knocked me over. You could just feel him. It was the most amazing energy I’ve ever felt in my entire life.”

Roberts also cites Bob Marley as unforgettable. “I had seen the film, The Harder They Come, and I became obsessed with Jamaica and reggae,” she says, “and I just had to photograph Bob Marley. We went down to Jamaica for the One Love for Peace concert in 1978 and I got to photograph him. I kept going back every year. Then Bob was coming to New York and his manager said I could photograph him on the roof of his hotel. I get there and suddenly there’s no time to go to the roof. It was a good thing I’d brought lighting, just in case. His death was the saddest thing to me.”

Another of Roberts’ passions has lasted decades: the annual Farm Aid Festival, organized by Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Mellencamp to build awareness about, and to raise funds to prevent, the loss of family farms. The first Farm Aid concert was in Champaign, Illinois, in 1985. It drew 80,000 people and featured performances by Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Bonnie Raitt, B.B. King, Loretta Lynn, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and many others. Roberts was there with her camera.

“I remember it rained all morning,” she says. “All the photographers were huddled backstage, unable to do much. Then it cleared up and Dylan and Tom Petty came on with the Heartbreakers, and it was just magic.

“I went back every year for 35 years, but that first concert stays with me. The shows went on so long into the night that I never got to sleep, and I had to catch an early flight. I remember that I was covered with mud, a total mess, when I got on the plane.”

Roberts has photographed several Memphis musicians through the years, including Jim Dickinson, B.B. King, Alex Chilton, Johnny Cash, and others, but if you ask her about Memphis, her memory quickly turns to the infamous Sex Pistols concert at the Taliesyn Ballroom (now the site of a Taco Bell on Union) on January 6, 1978.

“It was just the second concert the Sex Pistols had done in the U.S.,” Roberts remembers. “I was home for the holidays when I got the job. Their first concert was in Atlanta and I was supposed to go, but the weather was bad, so the publicist said to sit tight.

“Meanwhile, Memphis was going crazy. The newspapers were running stories day after day about the band and the show and about how the city would not allow simulated sex acts on stage, that sort of thing. The police even sent officers to Atlanta to check out the concert there — it was ridiculous. But that turned out to be the most exciting show I’ve ever photographed.

“The crowd was jammed in there in front of the band, jumping up and down. There was spitting and screaming and the music was so loud. It was an old mansion or something, definitely not a place you’d think to have a punk concert. The floor was bouncing so much I thought we’d fall through to the basement. I had no idea if any of my photographs would be in focus because of the bouncing and jostling.

“Finally, when it was over, the crowd left and I started gathering up my cameras and equipment. I remember there was just one guy left, sitting on the floor against the back wall. He had the mohawk, the safety pins, the look — all of it. His mouth was hanging wide open. I leaned over and asked him if he was all right and he said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ A polite punk. I thought it was very Memphis.”

Ebet Roberts’ work has been syndicated and exhibited worldwide and has been included in television specials, music anthologies, posters, advertisements, galleries, and private collections. Her photographs have been reproduced in publications and books, including Rolling Stone, SPIN, GQ, The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, People, USA Today, and  The Village Voice. They are also in the permanent collections of The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Seattle’s Experience Music Project, The Grammy Museum, and The Hard Rock Cafe. For information on prints, visit ebetroberts.com.