Photos courtesy of Jacob Rosenberg.

There aren’t many people you can point at and say ‘that person is more responsible than most for the way a modern skateboarding video looks’ but for Jacob Rosenberg you can.

Alongside the late Mike Ternasky, Jacob made Plan B’s 1992 and 1993 videos, Questionable and Virtual Reality. Two videos that changed the way modern skateboarding looked, showcasing this new generation of street skateboarding, their new tricks and their new boards with tiny wheels. Jacob was there on the red bricks at Embarcadero filming the likes of Mike Carroll and Jovontae Turner.

Through the use of Del the Funky Homosapien’s “Burnt” and “Ahonetwo, Ahonetwo”, in Questionable, Jacob got on the radar of the Bay Area underground hip hop scene, eventually shooting and making music videos for the Hieroglyphics, Souls of Mischief, De La Soul and Public Enemy.

The story of Jacob’s journey through skateboarding and music from 1988 and 1998 is all highlighted and told through photographs, Hi8 stills, screengrabs, 16mm film scans and never-before-seen ephemera, in his debut artist book, Right Before My Eyes, that he self-published and is available to buy from his website, here.

There are so many places we can start this interview, but I really want to know where the book starts for you.

It starts with me trying to understand a moment in time that defined my trajectory to now. The book was supposed to be focused on the Hieroglyphics, I was just going to make a Hiero book and make a skate book later. However, as we started to unpack the story of Hiero, I realised we had to explain how I got there. It became clear that it was this conversation between the passion that went into the skateboarding and that same passion that was transferred to Hieroglyphics later.

So, it started with skateboarding and flowed into the work with Hieroglyphics.

Yeah, for me it always starts with skateboarding because there was something with how impressionable I was by this incredible culture and feeling, I was twelve years old, and it just felt right. If you love skateboarding and it’s been with you your whole life, you can’t explain it, it feels like it explains you. At that time in seventh grade, it was like ‘Oh that’s me’. I saw myself in the videos, in the magazines and in the other skateboarders.

How did you get involved with working with the Hieroglyphics and the Bay Area hip hop scene?

It was through skateboarding and the Plan B videos; in those videos we very intentionally used this music that we loved which was from Hieroglyphics. The success of those videos made me a made man in the eyes of Hiero, they were like, ‘Jake’s good, he’s talented’. They would go on tour and people would come and talk to them about the songs that were unreleased and never put out but were in our videos.

Yeah, I’ve always been curious about that, how did you get those unreleased tracks?

The first video we used Hieroglyphics in was Plan B’s Questionable in ‘92 and after that was Virtual Reality in ’93. For Virtual Reality, I went to Del’s manager and asked for unreleased music. They saw that these videos had an impact so when we asked, they were down, and they sent me those tapes, some of which were photographed and included in the book. I have kept all that original stuff. It was through the success of the Plan B videos that I got connected with them.

Do you remember when you guys, as the skateboarders met the Hieroglyphics guys?

There was a contest in San Francisco called Back to the City and they came to the contest one year.

Woah, were they there the year that Mike Carroll and everyone were wearing the Girl shirts?

Yeah, they were there that year, the summer of ’93. I had already met them earlier because I did an interview with Del the Funky Homosapien for Blunt Magazine and got connected with the press pass and shot photos of the show. That was crazy. I was eighteen and shooting my idols.

That would’ve been so crazy, I had no idea that they were there that day. Was your introduction to Hiero, through Mike Carroll and Jovontae Turner?

Mike and Jovontae had the best taste in music at that point, but we were all really into Bay Area underground hip-hop. The tape itself that had the tracks that were different from Del’s record was Jovontae’s, Mike had it and I sort of stole from him.

I know that Del has been notoriously down with skateboarders, but what was that reaction from the rest of the hip-hop guys when they found out you had a big impact on their music’s popularity and introduced it to a new scene?

Souls of Mischief rapped about wearing Vans in ’92 and ’93 so they were sort of skate adjacent. They embraced the culture immediately; they never posed or played it off like they were skaters, but they loved the culture. Skateboarding and hip-hop in that time are similar youth voices that are the same age, we are all the same age – Del is a year older than me; Mike Carroll is two years younger than me; Tajai and I are the same age. They really embraced us and what they came to understand was the skateboarders were some of their most loyal fans.

For sure, it is so cool how tight you guys became. How did the idea come up originally for the book?

It was aligned with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the making of the ‘You Never Knew’ music video. It was 2023, I was turning fifty and I really wanted to encapsulate that moment with Hiero. I remastered the video, I rescanned the negative in 4K, which I still haven’t put it out. I knew that I really wanted to make this book but like anything I couldn’t get my shit together to do it. 

Yeah, starting is always the hardest thing, especially when you have so much that you need to narrow down, it’s hard.

I think you need to generate momentum and have people around you that help you. My editor, Greg Hunt, who is an incredible photographer and filmmaker started going through the photos with me and I brought in a book designer from the UK, Alexander Hansford. Both of them really made me feel like I could do it, then that was it. I started to go through the archives and find the photos, Greg really helped me cull it down into what was essential.

Greg would’ve been great to have to help, he was around in that era and has made countless books.

For sure, that was the big thing for me; he has that artistic taste. The other thing that was cool is he isn’t really a Hiero fan, he likes them, but he doesn’t know too much about them, he just knows we used the music in videos. In that way it was special because he would be really critical based on how the photos made him feel and I have so many photos of Hiero, it was like what is important to showcase.

For sure, how did the idea come up to eventually put the skateboarding story in it?

The way I built the book is I started building it within chapters, the book was sort of segmented by certain moments, eras or events. I map out the Hiero story which starts out at Blunt Magazine where there are profiles on Del and Casual, then it goes to a zine I made and then to the website. I had a little outline that had all those story beats and when I really looked at it, I was like I need to include what came before because you can’t get there without it. It was very abstract to think about including Virtual Reality, that is where it became about the artefacts, ephemera, including frame grabs from the credits and my notebooks from Virtual Reality so I could connect the dots to where we ended up.

How was it going through the Ephemera because you have so much?

We are dealing with this right now, with the fire. I was travelling, my wife facetimed me and was like ‘What do I save?’ I was like, ‘It is what it is, save some hard drives’ [laughs].

Yeah, wow. That is a nightmare situation. How did you choose what was necessary for the book? 

This has been coming up a lot, as I have so much stuff it became about what tells the story, what is relevant and what is meaningful for this.

It is awesome, I think having the photos of tapes and notebooks adds something extra to the book that a photo doesn’t have the ability to.

I mean arguably the media and physical media are more important than the photographs, photographs are so reproducible but the objects themselves could never be reproduced. To hold the actual video camera that filmed what you’re looking at is another thing completely.

There is also the mystery there, a lot of the people buying the book are fans of the era, whether it’s the skateboarding, the music or both and looking at a stack of tapes and seeing one that has ‘Mike Carroll’ written on it your mind is instantly racing wondering what is on that tape.

And I also have over a hundred tapes that I haven’t digitised.

You’ve obviously kept everything; did you have any idea at the time that people were still going to care about this era in thirty years?

No, not at all. I just saved it because I felt lucky to have filmed it, I felt so special to have done this, that it was important to me. It was more about me feeling the gratification of being a kid who felt different and left out of traditional social norms, who then found this thing that I could be inside of. Being inside of it I felt so privileged, that I just kept it for me. I didn’t put anything out from my archive until 2006 or 2007 when Patrick O’Dell started the Epicly Later’d series and he did a profile on me and used a bunch of my footage for the piece on John Cardiel. Then I did a shoe collab with Mikey with Lakai and I put a bunch of archived footage online, that was the first time I put raw footage on YouTube. At that time, I was surprised people were freaking out over it.

What do you think of people skating Embarcadero now?

I love it. The spot requires a lot of creativity to skate now. When Bill Strobeck went and took the Supreme guys there, I loved it. I’m here for the nostalgia, I feel some sort of way for the way these things make me feel. I love hearing the skating on the plaza bricks. There is one angle that you can look and it looks the exact same. If you look towards the three stairs and you’re inside the fountain it looks original and if you look the other way you see a pickleball court.

What! There’s a pickleball court in the middle of the city?

Yeah.

That is grim.

It feels like they are going to tear it down and when they do, I will go with a jackhammer and grab some bricks. 

You definitely have to grab some bricks.

I will for sure.

You’ve lived a whole life since this work, how has it been looking back at it? 

The longer the time passes with it being out in the world, the more interesting and new feelings I have about myself or the body of work in that time. It is the unexpected gift that comes out of it.

What are some of those feelings that you’ve been feeling?

I think I just saw that there is a very clear narrative to my story, it is very clear to me that I was compensating for parts of my life and my insecurities through this immersion into this culture. I was able to put blinders out and focus in on something. It reminds me about how I felt in those years and about how insecure people are in moments. That was a really challenging time for me, I had a best friend who died, I had another best friend go to prison, there are a lot of things that could have suffocated that voice. It is a lesson that you have to find that thing you are passionate about because when it stays kind of stagnant and you don’t find a way of channeling it, you risk losing that ability to express yourself.

You did a great job persevering through everything, you should be really proud of yourself for what you’ve done.

Thank you.