Over the course of five decades, South African photographer and filmmaker Norman Seeff has captured unique and iconic images of some of the biggest names in rock music and celebrity culture. Many of us may know these photographs, but few of us would have recognised that they were taken by a homegrown talent. Seeff himself admits, speaking from Los Angeles where he now lives, ahead of the opening of Norman Seeff: Homecoming,, an exhibition of his work at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town,
“I’ve done exhibits all over the world. Everywhere we go, people all say the same thing, 'We all know this work. It’s global knowledge, but we didn’t know it was all done by one person'.”
Seeff’s story begins in 1939 in Johannesburg where he was born. His father was a doctor, who would frequently take his young son with him on calls to tend to “non-white” patients in the townships around the city. Seeing the good that his father was trying to do for people who were rejected, oppressed and marginalised by white South African society, inspired in young Norman a desire to be “of service” in a world “so filled with pain and desperation”.
Seeff went to King Edward VII School where he graduated with honours in science and art and excelled as a soccer player, becoming, at the age of 17, the youngest player to be drafted into the National Football League, playing in stadiums in front of thousands of spectators.
After leaving high school, Seeff studied medicine and left home, moving into the top floor of a building in Hillbrow where he ran an art school after hours, teaching life drawing classes. He spent most of his time with artists, seeking to share his talent for drawing, which he recalls having been blessed with from an early age. “From about five or six years old, I was drawing anatomically correct figures in architectural environments,” says Seeff who, though he’d decided to pursue a career in medicine, was always passionate about the creative arts, which heavily influenced his goals as a doctor.
“I always had an incredible curiousity about human behaviour, specifically about the nature of the creative process, and where that came from. I was driven to do everything — painting, sculpting, writing, playing music... by the idea of having an individual voice.”
Medicine, which Seeff studied in his own individual but effective way, was a way of making people’s lives better. “It wasn’t just about fixing but healing, which is about bringing change,” he says.
In 1965, Seeff qualified as a doctor and went to work in emergency medicine at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto. Over the course of three years there, he began becoming disillusioned by what he describes as, “a repetitive cycle”. He says: “People would come in beaten up or severely dehydrated because they’d travelled a week to get to the hospital, and it was fixing and fixing and fixing, and then three weeks or three months later the same people would be back with the same conditions.”
Though he didn’t have the language to express it at the time, Seeff now sees that these experiences made him realise ”there had to be something different than just fixing; there had to be something that would bring about change, which, in fact, is the definition of healing”.
In 1968 — a year of tumult for much of the world, as protests against the war in Vietnam divided generations in the US, battles between students and the government spilled onto the streets of Paris, and the youth of Czechoslovakia seemed poised to topple Soviet rule — Seeff made his own momentous decision. “Suddenly I felt I wanted to challenge myself in what, at that point, was considered the most challenging city in the world — New York. As a person who loved challenge, I said to myself: ‘Get your butt out of town, go to New York and check out what’s going on there, accelerate your creativity',” he says.
Seeff wasn’t sure if he’d return to medicine or South Africa, but he knew he had to try to find out if he could make his mark as an artist. He arrived in the Big Apple, where he soon discovered it was easier to take photographs than be a painter. He spent a year walking the streets, taking photos, using up his swiftly dwindling film stock and running out of money for food and lodging.
Somehow, he managed to find himself in the right places at the right time. In the famed nightclub Max’s Kansas City, he saw a young Patti Smith and her friend Robert Mapplethorpe and asked if he could take their photos. Through them, and other still unknown but interesting looking characters, he ended up meeting and photographing Andy Warhol and his entourage at The Factory and a host of other figures, who, says Seeff, weren’t big stars yet. “Because I started photographing these people, suddenly I had a portfolio of the subculture of New York.”
As his money and his film ran out, Seeff began to ask himself: “What the f*** have you done? You’ve got to be out of your mind. What a stupid decision.”
A year after arriving in New York, Seeff was told by a friend to show his portfolio to graphic artist Bob Cato, a seminal figure in the world of album cover design, whose work for artists like Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and Barbara Streisand had earned him Grammy awards and helped to elevate the album cover to the status of a serious pop culture art form. Seeff visited Cato at his five-storey East Side brownstone and remembers walking up the stairs, seeing Cato’s art everywhere and thinking: “This is why I’m in America. I want to meet people with this level of artistry.”
Cato took his time to seriously look over the young South African’s portfolio, and Seeff recalls seeing his eyes wet. "I thought, ‘oh my God! I’m not losing my mind, this is going to work'.”
A few months later, Cato demonstrated his belief in Seeff’s talent when he asked him to drive to Woodstock to photograph Robbie Robertson and The Band at their fabled Big Pink studio for the inner-sleeve artwork for their forthcoming album Stage Fright. Seeff, who had never driven a car on the right hand sided roads of America, borrowed a car and a strobe light, packed his last seven precious rolls of film and headed upstate. He got lost, arriving three hours late for the shoot, much to the irritation of The Band. He corralled them into a room for a shoot that lasted only 30 minutes.
Convinced that he'd blown it, Seeff returned to the apartment in New York he shared with friends, locked himself in the bathroom and developed his film to discover that he didn’t like any of it. “Finally, I found one shot that wasn’t too bad. I spent 10 days working on dodging some people’s faces and managed to get something.”
Still mortified at his failure, and too embarrassed to face his benefactor Cato, Seeff walked across Central Park and slipped the single photo under the front door of the brownstone. Hearing nothing for 10 days, his roommates convinced him to phone Cato, who shouted, “Where the f*** have you been? I don’t have your phone number,” before settling down to inform Seeff that Robertson loved his picture so much they decided to insert it as a poster under the shrink-wrap of the album. Soon Seeff found himself walking into bars and clothing stores and there was his poster. “It became the hottest poster in New York. Suddenly art directors were calling me,” he says.
In 1971, Seeff was recommended by Cato for the job of art director at United Artists Records. The former soccer star and doctor from Joburg who'd three years earlier been living on couches and struggling to afford film stock, let alone food, found himself on a first class plane to Los Angeles, where everyone wanted to see him because “I was the guy who was going to give everyone work.”
He stayed for a year at the Hyatt House. "Everyone called it ‘The Riot House’ because it was full of crazy music and people, and there was a British green convertible Mustang outside waiting for me.” Within a year of his tenure as art director, United went from never having earned a Grammy nomination for album cover design to earning five out of the 10 possible nominations for that year. Seeff, who had looked up at the billboards on Sunset Boulevard and thought, “I want to have my stuff up there because it was like a societal art gallery for the people”, found himself surrounded by multiple billboards adorned with his work.
Though he has nothing but good things to say about United and his time there, after two years Seeff decided he didn’t want to be “sitting comfortably in the company”. He wanted to prove to himself that he could survive as an independent photographer. “I resigned and, ironically, Bob Cato moved to LA and took over my job. I got a studio on Sunset and things took off. I was shooting Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, The Eagles — all of those celebrities.”
When he first began shooting album covers and publicity shots, Seeff says he found the process of being face to face with so many globally recognised idols terrifying. “I had to hide my fear. It was a profoundly frightening experience.” He soon realised that, unlike medicine, where he’d been taught not to get involved with patients to be able to remain objective, his new career required a different approach. He understood that everything he was doing was about communication, intimacy, vulnerability, authenticity. “I started building incredible communication with artists,” he says.
Shooting director Martin Scorsese is one example: “I’d tell him I’d seen his films but wasn't interested in what he had done. I was interested in how he did what he did, how he got people to be so real.” Exploring the answers to these questions, Seeff would be ready with his camera to capture moments of spontaneity and authentic emotional interaction, and the portraits he captured soon lead artists to really want to work with him. “They felt seen. At that point, I realised the interaction had to be peer-to-peer, artist to artist.”
Seeff started filming his sessions as happenings, asking his subjects to delve into broader questions around the creative process and perform in front of an audience. “My sessions began to be known in LA as a, the ‘Norman Seeff event’. People would beg to come to them.”
For Seeff, photography became a way to get artists into the studio, but his bigger aim was to explore the artist’s creative process. “That’s fascinating to people because the creative process is archetypal of everyone’s process. Artists are the authors of their own stories. They represent a fundamental, highest truth, which is that people write their own lives. My project became a bigger process — exposing the fundamental human capacity to create. I’ve been exploring the dynamics of how we create the stories of our lives for the last 50 years.”
In the 1990s, Seeff took another detour, disappearing from the world of photography to explore new opportunities in the arena of commercials, where he was able to use the unique relationships he had developed with artists and celebrities to create work for major clients from Apple — and other big tech companies — to car manufacturers and fast food chains. “I did the biggest campaigns in the country. At one time, I had 200 international TV commercials on air. It was an opportunity to fund the filming of my interviews and to create my own film school.”
Now, with thousands of hours of interview footage, Seeff has embarked on what he describes, at the age of 85, as the real beginning of his career, a project that aims to distill the lessons learned from his subjects into a blueprint he hopes will help people across cultures, generations and disciplines unlock the potential of their own creativity. “The Sessions Project” is multi-faceted and includes a series of short films edited from interviews and an eight-part television series, plus a planned autobiographical film that Seeff is thinking of titling, Norman Seeff: The Autobiography of the Artist as a 'Rock photographer’.
He hopes it will show that understanding the dynamics of the creative process helps build confidence and courage to impact the success of one's vision and dreams, creating better outcomes.
Seeff has already presented the work and its lessons to G8 Summit audiences at Davos, the United Nations, the Nasa team that put a rover on Mars and various corporations suchas Intel. He hopes to be able to present it in South Africa, “It will affect interpersonal relationships, problem-solving and education. I’d love to come to South Africa to have a social conversation with people across the spectrum.”
Though he’s not going to be coming home for the Norval exhibition, Seeff is nonetheless touched by the idea that his work is showing in the country of his birth, even if he’s lived most of his life in the US. “It’s emotional. I’ve been away so long, but I have a fundamental DNA link because Africa has a particular energy that’s unlike anywhere else. I wasn’t sure I’d ever come back —the life I lead is non-stop,” he saysbut hopes audiences who visit the exhibition will see the work he's done provides a guidance system for people. “"It creates maps of the journey that help them make decisions along the way. It’s fascinating. I enjoy what I’m doing, but it’s not about whether or not people sing my praises.”
- Norman Seeff: Homecoming is at The Norval Foundation in Cape Town until February 05 2025. For more information visit norvalfoundation.org and normanseeff.com
