Born in New York City, Jeffrey Blankfort grew up in Los Angeles, attaining his BA in History at UCLA while working for the Los Angeles Examiner, one of the city’s main newspapers where he learned the dark room skills that would later serve him when he chose to make his living behind the camera.

From the mid-60s to the early 90s he worked as a documentary photographer, with a special focus on the political struggles of the times, from the fight to end racial discrimination in the hiring practices of San Francisco’s hotels and restaurants, to the protests against the Vietnam war and the military draft, to the emergence of the Black Panthers and the Brown Berets in the ghettos and barrios of Northern and Southern California, to the resistance by the IRA to the British occupation of Northern Ireland, and then to the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon and Jordan, documenting the never-ending struggle of the Palestinians to regain the homeland from which they had been forcefully driven in 1948.

While living most of his adult life in the San Francisco, Blankfort traveled widely, living for various lengths of time in Mexico, where he also taught photography, Italy, France, and England, documenting with his camera political conflicts as well as ordinary life in each of those countries.

Blankfort’s photographs have been published in TIME, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Saturday Evening Post, New York Times, Ramparts, San Francisco Chronicle and major publications in Europe and Latin America. They have appeared in a number of books for the general public as well as school texts and are in the collections of several museums including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Blankfort’s photos have been part of a number of group exhibits as well as in one person shows. In 1967, his photos of “Children of Rome” were part of a two-person show at San Francisco’s Focus Gallery and were re-exhibited at the city’s Italian Cultural Center in 2017. In 2001, he participated in the group show at the Berkeley Art Center, “The Whole World is Watching,” celebrating the social and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In 2015 he had solo exhibitions at the African-American Cultural Complex in San Francisco and a retrospective at the Harvey Milk Photography Center, also in San Francisco. Most recently, in October, 2023, his still photos from the late French film maker Agnes Varda’s 1968 movie, “Lions’ Love,” were exhibited at the Cinematheque in Paris and remain a part of the traveling exhibition celebrating Varda’s life and work.