June 21, 2019

Bob Seidemann & Blind Faith

~
 date & photographer unknown


Bob Seidemann was an American graphic artist and photographer who was born on December 28, 1941, in Manhattan, New York, and grew up in Queens. He graduated from the Manhattan High School of Aviation Trades and apprenticed with photographer Tom Caravaglia in NYC before heading west to San Francisco. There he collaborated with David Getz, Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley, Big Brother and the Holding Company, George Hunter, The Charlatans, Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead to create photographic images at the forefront of the popular and revolutionary culture of the time. His 1967 portraits of a semi-nude Joplin earned him wide acclaim.



Janis Joplin - 1967 
photos by Bob Seidemann



Seidemann photographed The Grateful Dead a number of times during their peak, both for posters and album liners, as well as designing the covers for the debut solo album of Jerry Garcia, Garcia, and the Dead's Wake of the Flood with Rick Griffin illustrations.


vinyl LP album cover
art work & design by Bob Seidemann


Seidemann took the Grateful Dead to Daly City, Calif., south of San Francisco, for a shoot. The five band members, all dressed in black, stood in the middle of a suburban street of look-alike houses, their faces illuminated eerily by light reflected from mirrors pointed at them by assistants.     


Grateful Dead -1967 


When Eric Clapton formed his new band he commissioned Seidemann to create the cover for their album. Seidemann photographed a nude 11-year-old girl to create what would become his most famous and controversial work, titled Blind Faith. Not only did it become the cover and title of Blind Faith the album, but the name of the band as well.


vinyl LP front cover
photo by Bob Seidemann 
photo of album by Styrous®


Seidemann explained:
"I could not get my hands on the image until out of the mist a concept began to emerge. To symbolize the achievement of human creativity and its expression through technology a spaceship was the material object. To carry this new spore into the universe, innocence would be the ideal bearer, a young girl, a girl as young as Shakespeare's Juliet. The spaceship would be the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the girl, the fruit of the tree of life.

The spaceship could be made by Mick Milligan, a jeweller at the Royal College of Art. The girl was another matter. If she were too old it would be cheesecake, too young and it would be nothing. The beginning of the transition from girl to woman, that is what I was after. That temporal point, that singular flare of radiant innocence. Where is that girl?" 
Seidemann wrote that he approached a girl reported to be 14 years old on the London Underground about modelling for the cover, and eventually met with her parents, but that she proved too old for the effect he wanted. Instead, the model he used was her younger sister Mariora Goschen, who was reported to be 11 years old. Mariora initially requested a horse as a fee but was instead paid £40.

In 1994, more than a quarter of a century after her one-off photo shoot, 36 year old Mariora Goschen said in an interview: “The nudity didn’t bother me. I hardly noticed I had breasts. Life was far too hectic. I was mad about animals and much taken up with family and friends. But now, when people tell me they can remember what they were doing when they first saw the cover, and the effect it had on them, I’m thrilled to bits.” She added, “By the way, I’m still waiting for Eric Clapton to ring me about the horse.”


Mariora Goschen - 2014
photo by Tom Pilston/The Times    


More than 40 years later, when Who Shot Rock & Roll, a touring exhibition of 175 pictures, went to the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina, a group demanded that the Blind Faith cover be removed. “It stayed in,” Gail Buckland, the exhibition’s curator, said in an interview. “But it was still pushing buttons in 2011.”   

From 1974 till 1984 Seidemann produced more than 60 record album covers in Los Angeles, among them Late for the Sky, by Jackson Browne, and On the Beach (1974) by Neil Young.       


vinyl LP front cover
design by Gary Burden 
photo by Bob Seidemann

From the late 1980s till 2000, Seidemann produced a portfolio of 302 aviation-themed photographs entitled Airplane as Art. Striking abstract photographs of all manner of aircraft and environmental portraits of aircraft engineers, designers, and pilots make up the collection.    

The fighting machine is the clearest example of form following function. Commercial aircraft users are not interested in hard diving inverted turns. Rather they would prefer uneventful journeys. As a consequence all commercial aircraft look virtually alike. It is the military flying machines that display extraordinary and varied shape. It is the blend of exterior form and interior mechanism, electronics, and human interaction that creates "living" kinetic sculpture.          

Airplane As Art is in included in the Getty Museum Photography Collection, McDermott Library at The University of Texas, Dallas, and The Boeing Corporate Collection.   


 SR-71 reconnaissance jets
Lockheed facility
Palmdale, Calif., 1998
photo by Bob Seidemann
  
His 1969 Blind Faith flush-mounted and signed chromogenic photo print (#17 of an edition of 30), sold at Sotheby's in New York City on June 24, 2014, (lot 20), at $17,500.        
        
    
Bob Seidemann - 2014
photographer unknown

 
Bob Seidemann died on Nov. 27, 2017, at his home in Vallejo, Calif. His wife, Belinda Seidemann, said he had Parkinson’s disease. He was 75 years old.    



Viewfinder links:                      
          
Blind Faith & Bob Seidemann       
Jackson Browne            
Eric Clapton       
Jerry Garcia        
Grateful Dead              
Janis Joplin       
Bob Seidemann      
Neil Young           
          
Net links:                      
    
Bob Seidemann website                      
gragroupblog ~ End of an era: the passing of photographer Bob Seidemann      
MSR Institute ~ Airplane as Art
NY Times obit     
Print Magazine ~ Bob Seidemann’s Provocative and Heavenly Photos   
TRPS ~ The Rock Photographer Who Set His Artistic Sights Higher   
Vintage Everyday ~ Mariora Goschen: Girl on the Blind Faith album Cover  
Washington Post obit          
       


“To be honest with you, I wasn’t very interested in the music, 
it was the scene, you know?"
                ~  Bob Seidemann
        
     

Styrous® ~ Friday, June 21, 2017        



          
       













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