Photographed the 1960s era of rock stars
He photographed Janis Joplin wearing nothing but beads. He also once captured the members of the Grateful Dead looking jaunty in black as they stood in front of a row of cookiecutter houses in a Bay Area suburb.
Bob Seidemann, a photographer and art director known for his iconic images of ’60s era rock stars, and for producing a controversial album cover featuring a partially nude pubescent girl for the band Blind Faith, died at his Bay Area home on Mare Island on Nov. 27. He was 75.
The cause was Parkinson’s disease, said Belinda Seidemann, his wife of more than 30 years.
“The graphics of the era were framed by the photos Bob took,” says Douglas Brian Martin, a photographer and longtime friend of Seidemann’s. “He gave a regal purity to hippies like the Grateful Dead. He made it look natural. They weren’t posing.”
The natural quality of Seidemann’s images could be attributed to the bond with his subjects — he was simply photographing his friends.
Drawn to San Francisco from his native New York in the 1960s by the burgeoning beatnik scene, Seidemann befriended the poets, artists, writers and musicians of the city’s North Beach neighborhood. Those acquaintances included David Getz, the drummer for Big Brother and the Holding Company, the group fronted by Joplin.
“He just fell in with these people — it was just the crowd,” Belinda Seidemann said. “So he began taking some pictures, and those were some of his very early pictures, of Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead.”
Photography led him to shoot and art direct album covers for The Grateful Dead, Randy Newman and Cheap Trick. But one of his most memorable and contentious covers was his first: the 1969 self-titled album for Blind Faith, a supergroup composed of Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Ric Grech and Ginger Baker.
Clapton asked Seidemann to devise the cover art, and he responded with an image that featured a shirtless 11-year-old girl holding a model airplane. (The girl, Mariora Goschen, was photographed with her parents’ consent.) The image caused a sensation, with some critics describing the plane as a phallic symbol. In the U.S., Goschen’s image was replaced with a photo of the band.
Seidemann insisted that the Blind Faith cover was not intended to be sexually interpreted.
“To symbolize the achievement of human creativity and its expression through technology, a space ship was the material object,” he wrote. “To carry this new spore into the universe, innocence would be the ideal bearer, a young girl as young as Shakespeare’s Juliet. The space ship would be the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the girl, the fruit of the tree of life.”
Seidemann was born Robert Seidemann in New York City in 1941. He was raised in Woodside, Queens, near LaGuardia Airport, and as a boy, was fascinated with planes.
After graduating from the Manhattan High School of Aviation Trades, he got a job delivering film for a laboratory, a gig that turned him on to the possibilities of photography.
Seidemann soon landed a job as a photo assistant for Tom Caravaglia, who was then a commercial photographer. He moved in the 1960s to San Francisco, because, his wife said, “he started hearing that all the beatniks were going to the coast.” (It was in San Francisco where he met the young Belinda Bryant, whom he married in 1983.)
Seidemann never lost his ability to craft an artful image, Martin said.
“About 15 years ago, I did an installation in Marina del Rey,” he recalled. “I wanted to take pictures of it. Bob said, ‘I’ll take the pictures.’ He showed up with a Hasselblad and no light meter. I thought, ‘Seidemann has lost his mind!’ He said, ‘I don’t need a light meter.’
“And every shot was perfect,” he said. “He knew what he was doing.”
Seidmann is survived by his younger brother, Donald Seidemann, who lives in Seattle, and Belinda. The couple had no children.