About Jesse

Jesse's first camera arrived on his sixth birthday as a present from his father, celebrated photographer Simpson Kalisher. A darkroom soon followed. Over the years, Jesse worked with his father both in the darkroom and as his assistant. Yet despite his enthusiasm for the medium, when it came time to go to college and consider a career, Jesse took his father’s advice and focused on anything but photography.

A decade long career in advertising and marketing followed. During that time, Jesse worked for BBDO, Grey Advertising, The Clorox Company and J. Walter Thompson. He created marketing plans and advertising for brands ranging from Fresh Step Cat Litter to Oral-B toothbrushes and Sprint. If you’re of the right age, you might remember the long-running Sprint ad campaign with Candace Bergen. He helped create that. In December ‘95, he gave his final notice and resigned his position as a VP, Management Supervisor with J. Walter Thompson.

“I realized I needed to do something different with my life, something in the arts, something which involved both creation and communication. Jesse says, "Truth is, I thought I was going to be a writer". In early January ‘96, Jesse boarded a plane for Hanoi and two months of untold adventures. He carried with him a simple point and shoot camera. It was during his first few days in Vietnam that he looked through the small viewfinder and had an epiphany. He had seen a few kids playing badminton on an otherwise deserted early morning street, lifted that camera to his eye and expected to see a snapshot. He saw instead a tableau filled with meaning. And in that very instant he re-discovered his love affair with photography.

After two months in Southeast Asia, Jesse returned to San Francisco and slowly began experimenting with a variety of cameras and lenses. One year later, he had two projects underway. The first was a modest enterprise in which he took black and white photographs of San Francisco that he then sold through a local store. The second project was more ambitious; it was to explore an idea he’d had many years earlier, to create a collection of B&W documentary portraits of a wide range of Americans and combine those images with short 350-word interview excerpts from these same people in which they discussed their attitudes toward and experiences with race relations in America. He named this project “Indivisible.”

Work from “Indivisible” was quickly acquired by The Oakland Museum of California and added to their permanent collection. This then led to a dialog with the Photo Editor at Chronicle Books who took an active interest in Jesse’s photography.

During this same period, Jesse began work on two different fine art collections. The first, titled “The Human Race at Work,” is an on-going set of images that show the range of  ways in which people of all classes and on all continents spend their days at work, from London rail commuters to Ethiopian women carrying sticks on their backs. This collection has been honored with two exhibits including a year-long show at the Oakland Museum of California and will, with any luck, be the focus of an upcoming book.

The second collection Jesse began work on is titled “If You Find The Buddha,” and is now presented in this popular book published by Chronicle Books.

“Photography allows me to confront people’s views of themselves and the world in which they live – and that," Jesse says "is why I take pictures".