Photographic exhibition featuring Mick Jagger
Proud Galleries, London, UK
23rd Nov 2018 - 13th Jan 2019

Photographs by Norman Seeff, an intimate collection of Seeff’s acclaimed photographic sessions featuring influential 20th Century musical icons. The exhibition is open to the public from the 23rd November 2018 – 13th January 2019 at Proud Central.

From the Rolling Stones to Joni Mitchell, Norman Seeff’s perceptive lens captures thought-provoking images of iconic artists session after session. The exhibition explores the sensitive collaboration between photographer and musician; whether photographed mid-smile or deep in contemplation, Seeff’s subjects are effortlessly captured in moments of spontaneity. Famed for emotionally engaging with his subjects, Seeff’s photographs in Sessions in Sound are intimate, lively and authentic.

Press release:

Sessions in Sound: Photographs by Norman Seeff

Bjornulf

When following Norman Seeff on line I bumped into lots of Exile/Nellcote pics that are very rarely seen. Like alternates of classic photos.

Quote
Palace Revolution 2000
When following Norman Seeff on line I bumped into lots of Exile/Nellcote pics that are very rarely seen. Like alternates of classic photos.

Can you share the links?

Norman Seeff explains his celebrity photographs, from Tina Turner to the Rolling Stones

The photographer tells the stories behind his famous shoots as his work goes on display in London


Ike and Tina Turner
Norman Seeff

There are photographs of Ike and Tina Turner taken the year before she left him that seem to cut to the core of their abusive relationship. Tina, in a floaty top with big hair and glossy lips, works the camera, but snatches alternately watchful and indulgent glances at her husband. Ike, stiffer in a double-breasted suit, tie, bowler hat and octagonal spectacles, glowers or looks enraptured by her. The session changed the life of the man who took the pictures, but it wasn’t the photographs that did it. It was the film he shot while taking them.

Norman Seeff was already well established as a leading music industry photographer with a portfolio that included classic shots of Patti Smith, the Band, the Rolling Stones, the Eagles, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Kiss as well as non-musicians such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol and Steve Martin. Some of those shots, with later images of Blondie, Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, feature in Sessions in Sound, the exhibition of Seeff’s work at the Proud Central gallery in London that starts on Friday.


Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith
Norman Seeff

Yet Seeff, 79, was always hungry to do more than just take pictures: he wanted to capture creativity in action. His studio sessions on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles were like parties, attended by up to 200 guests, and for the first time that day in 1975 he had instructed his staff to film the proceedings.

Shooting the Turners was electrifying, Seeff says, sitting in his quiet new studio in the rather more sedate part of Los Angeles where he works now. He is wearing faded jeans and a loose striped grey shirt with no collar. His silver hair, thinning on top, hangs to his shoulders. There are deep bags under his searching blue eyes.

In a soft South African accent he explains that he could tell that there was an “edge” to the Turners’ rapport, but he didn’t understand it until years later, when he worked with them separately. What he could observe was their explosive spontaneity. Tina in particular generated an intensity like a “nuclear reactor”. You could see them “actually giving each other instructions” as they performed a song together. You could also see how the creative tension between them was undergirded by something more sinister.

When Seeff developed the footage he was stunned by the intimacy with which it depicted their partnership. “When he feels she’s out of control he grabs her hand,” he says. “He crushes her knuckles, he hurts her. Then the next minute he’s kissing her with such passion you can see that he loves her completely.

“You can see that he’s in this duality of ‘I’m the tough man, in control’, but at the same time ‘I’m terrified of loss’. All of those dynamics come out. I knew in that moment exactly what I was going to do from then on.”

Since then Seeff has filmed his photoshoots with everyone from Fleetwood Mac to Martin Scorsese and Steve Jobs. He has evolved into “an explorer of the creative process” and compiled, at great personal cost, an archive of thousands of hours of conversations with and performances by some of the most creative people on the planet. The $10 million he has ploughed into the project has meant that despite huge success in his field he has essentially “lived without money” for decades. So far almost none of this archive has seen the light of day.


Mick Jagger
Norman Seeff

Seeff took an unconventional path to the summit of the music industry. Growing up in Johannesburg, he excelled at sport, but also painted, drew and wrote poetry. He felt uncomfortable in the emotionally suppressed, controlling society of white South Africa, but did not understand why. “I was very good at everything, but because of the world I lived in I felt like a stranger in a strange land, like there was something wrong with me.” He became cynical and despairing. “I didn’t know there was another way to think.”

Turning down the chance of a career as a footballer, he followed his father into medicine and worked as a trauma specialist in Soweto. There he saw first-hand the “madness” of life under apartheid. “If you were in the hospital and a black man was dying and you only had blood from a white person, you were not allowed to give them the blood. If a white person was in an accident, they would rather die than have blood from a black person.”

Like most of his friends Seeff was involved in underground resistance to the regime. For a time he ran a safe house. Years later one of the fugitives from the secret police that he sheltered became defence minister under Nelson Mandela.

Unlike most of his friends Seeff objected to violent actions. Even before their network was infiltrated and people started getting arrested, he found himself searching for a way to live without perpetuating the power dynamics around him.

One morning, when Seeff was 29, he woke up and decided to leave. He resigned from his job, packed a single bag and bought a one-way ticket to New York. “I was very clear that America was the land of freedom — at that time,” he says, letting out a deliberate chuckle.


Keith Richards
Norman Seeff

Seeff had planned initially to be a painter and sculptor, but by the time he arrived in New York he was set on photography. He landed in December 1968 “in the midst of the worst snowstorm in decades, a garbage strike and a time when people didn’t have to pick up after their dogs”. There were piles of filthy, stinking black snow everywhere. “I came here thinking that everybody had two helicopters in their garage, and I was shocked.

“My game plan was adolescent hubris. Thinking, ‘I can do anything, I’ll survive anywhere. I’ll just walk into New York and survive.’ I didn’t realise that I’d walk into a place where there are 100,000 people all trying to do the same thing and they all have studios and agents and managers.”

His rudimentary technical skills were no handicap, but he realised to his horror that he needed more than just his strong aesthetic sense to deliver the photographs he aspired to. “I wanted people to be present and wanted people to look as if they’re inspired and alive and breathing. The shock was that that doesn’t happen automatically. You have to engage people. You need to learn how to inspire people so that they look at you a certain way.”


Ray Charles
Norman Seeff

In six weeks his savings ran out. “I spent a year almost on the street, not getting work. It was a tough time. I went into terrible self-doubt.” He was saved by his talent, charm and good luck. Seeff’s roommate, the only person he knew when he arrived, introduced him to the club Max’s Kansas City, where he met and befriended the singer Patti Smith and the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, her boyfriend at the time. Andy Warhol’s Factory was across the street and Seeff got to know and photograph Warhol and his entourage. Roving the streets, he forced himself to find a new subject every day.

Eventually painters that he knew introduced him to the album cover designer Bob Cato, who gave him his first proper job: photographing the Band. Driving in America for the first time, in a borrowed car, Seeff got lost and arrived for the shoot two hours late. The Band were furious. After 45 minutes he ran out of film and drove home distraught. He was so embarrassed by the results that he put the one image he could stand in an envelope and pushed it under the door of Cato’s house rather than hand it to him. That image became a wraparound poster sold with the Band’s album Stage Fright and Seeff’s career took off.


Blondie
Norman Seeff

In 1971 Seeff relocated to Los Angeles to design LPs and posters for United Artists Records. Two years later he struck out on his own at the Sunset Boulevard studio. One of his most celebrated projects was the design for the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St album, which involved a drunken photoshoot that did not start until midnight. Seeff’s pictures of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are definitive documents of the period. “I saw Keith coming in almost holding on to the wall and realised that he was loaded, but the beautiful part is that Mick is incredibly organised and completely together,” he says. “They are such pros it doesn’t matter if Keith is loaded. Mick is the guy that did everything. He made the choices.”

Typically, he found, “people really don’t like being photographed. They feel objectified. They often have a lot of self-judgment.” Sitters responded by being hostile, silent or constantly telling jokes, “so there’s no person there”. Or by tranquillising themselves with alcohol and drugs. Some, like the singer and pianist Dr John, turned up so high on heroin that they were “almost impossible to reach”.

Seeff also drank and took drugs to conquer his nerves, but eventually he learnt the disarming power of vulnerability — allowing the subject to see his anxiety. Fear, he realised, was actually “a compass” leading the artist towards the unknown. “I started saying to people, ‘If you’re not scared, you’re not stepping beyond your boundaries.’ ”


Joni Mitchell
Norman Seeff

He quit drugs “right before the session with Fleetwood Mac, which was the wrong time to stop because they got completely f***ed up”. By then a clean-living, yoga-pants-wearing vegetarian, he “felt like a kindergarten teacher trying to corral a bunch of children”.

Ray Charles, seven years later, was surly and impatient, saying, “Let’s get this thing over,” but by finding the right level to engage with him Seeff turned the session around and caught him “in a state of absolute spontaneous, ecstatic expression”. He photographed the musician as he was playing piano and “taking our conversation and creating his lyrics and composing right there”.

It’s this sense of intimacy that Seeff hopes to share with the world, if he can get the funding to develop his film archive, which is in a climate-controlled vault beneath Los Angeles. He dreams of turning it into a multi-platform resource, including TV series, a web channel, workshops, live shows and virtual-reality experiences. “People are saying to me, ‘You have a national treasure and it’s time to get it out.’ ”

Do you want to make some money now then? “Oh, I’ve got to. But making money is a very creative art form.”
Sessions in Sound: Photographs by Norman Seeff is at Proud Central, London WC2 from November 23

[www.thetimes.co.uk]

“They are such pros it doesn’t matter if Keith is loaded. Mick is the guy that did everything. He made the choices.”

Seeff should have been a shrink. He perfectly understood how the Stones machine has been working for the last 50 years!

Iconic keef , Patti Smith and Joni Mitchell shots. Not so keen on the jagger ones although he clearly was in awe of jagger

A Photographer Remembers What It Was like to Shoot The Rolling Stones

Belle Hutton

To coincide with an exhibition of his work in London, Norman Seeff recalls his encounters with The Stones

Moving from South Africa to New York – via London, where the only downside was the weather, he says – saw multi-platform artist Norman Seeff undergo a radical career change. Having been an emergency doctor in Apartheid-era Soweto, when he found himself in New York in the early 70s he began pursuing photography. At downtown counterculture bar Max’s Kansas City Seeff would rub shoulders with the likes of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe and would photograph them too, capturing them in intimate, domestic settings. “It was horrible for a year and a half because I got no work, and then I met a man who became my mentor,” Seeff remembers. “The artwork for my first album cover shoot – Robbie Robertson and The Band – became hugely successful. Suddenly I was the rock photographer in New York who got work.”

As creative director at United Artists Records in LA for two years, Seeff was responsible for some of the era’s most seminal album covers, creating artwork for the likes of Ike & Tina Turner, Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell (with whom he has recently released a book) and James Taylor. Throughout his decades of working with artists from the world of music and beyond, Seeff has honed a unique method of capturing his subjects in both still and moving images. A collaborative and spontaneous “creative communication”, Seeff engages the artists in conversations and the sessions are filmed and photographed. These sessions have over the years become “an intense process of creating a vulnerable and powerful creative relationship”, the aim of which is to explore creativity. “I would push artists beyond their comfort zones to create something new, and genuine artists would rise to the occasion and go into some amazing places of authentic creativity.”

One night in the early 1970s – while he was honing this singular way of conducting sessions, but just prior to when he started filming as well as photographing his subjects – Seeff shot The Rolling Stones. Then at the height of fame, the band were releasing Exile on Main Street, their first record via their own label. Seeff was responsible for the photography and art direction of the album that came to be one of the band’s most experimental and critically acclaimed. Here, as an exhibition opens at Proud Central showcasing the photographic output of these sessions, Seeff remembers the midnight shoot.

“I did about three sessions with The Rolling Stones. At that point my career had taken off in New York and I’d been asked to fly to LA to become creative director of a record company called United Artists. I was at United Artists when I got a call from The Stones’ management asking me to do the Exile on Main Street album, and they wanted me on both sides – so doing the photography and the design. So I was given a day to step outside of my role and Mick Jagger had the idea of – after seeing a photograph of the Ballets Russes defecting to the United States down the ramp of a plane – them coming down, or on dockside, defecting to France in protest of the tax laws. We couldn’t take The Rolling Stones to a dock because we would have had to fight off a thousand people, so we had one day and we built – this being Hollywood, with set builders and stuff – a dockside set.

“We started the shoot at midnight, and I think The Rolling Stones had been in the studio all day. We’d been drinking gallons of cheap wine that Mick Jagger hated when he came. He said ‘great session, terrible wine’. So we were all a little stoned by the time they arrived, but I have to say that Keith was more stoned than we were. We realised everything was OK, Mick was absolutely professionally responsible, as was the whole group. In fact what I’ve found with top groups: they may be out there and they may party, but when it comes to work, there’s a work ethic that is very impressive.

“We ended up having an incredible session in the studio and I don’t know how many hours it was, and at one point one of my assistants dressed up as an extra on the set and turned around and tried to kiss Mick. The two of them tumbled down and I happened to be right there and I got the whole fall. That falling down became one of those concertina postcard things that you could buy at travel kiosks. It was this whole sequence that was put into the album, and people could tear the postcards out and put a stamp on and write to people.

“They asked me to come back and I hung out with them at the house and we did a couple of the other sessions, just more Keith against a grey background – it needed nothing, it’s just such an iconic rock and roll shot. Unfortunately when I did The Rolling Stones I was not filming. I found Mick incredibly present – this duality of a genuine creativity, but at the same time that ability to be responsible for delivering whatever needs to be delivered. Even though we started at midnight and everyone had been very heavily engaged all day when it came to working, it was incredibly professional. Mick is very aware creatively of what’s going on outside of himself. That makes for someone who participates in a very co-creative, collective way. I have to say it was effortless to work with them – no diva qualities, just this is what we’ve got to do, let’s get down and dirty and work. I’m not saying it was a passive thing, he actually gives a lot creatively because he’s got that imagination and that willingness to jump in fully to whatever’s happening.”

Sessions in Sound: Photographs by Norman Seeff runs at Proud Central from November 23, 2018 until January 13, 2019.

[www.anothermanmag.com]