Suzanne Seed has seen a lot in her magnificent life.
She is an author, photojournalist, playwright and mother, was married to the Playboy magazine founding art director Art Paul and her pathway into Chicago photography began in 1965 with Chicago Sun-Times advice columnist Ann Landers (Esther “Eppie” Lederer). Like many of us, Seed felt adrift during the pandemic. Her husband had died in 2018 at the age of 93. So, as she began downsizing on the 75th-floor apartment they shared at the John Hancock Center, she started looking out the windows, as she had done so many times before. And she began to see something different and something far more than distance.
Alone, she saw connection.
With her iPhone only, Seed took pictures of clouds, streets, buildings, and high-rise window washers she could wave at. Sometimes they would wave back. The clouds parted. “I was amazed to see myself- at this advanced age--transforming as an artist,” Seed said during aMay 2024 conversation in her apartment. In January of 2023, an exhibit of 33 photographs from her urban perch was shown at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center in Evanston, IL. It then moved to the popular CODA fine arts gallery in Palm Desert, CA.
Suzanne Seed was born on March 8, 1940, in Gary, IN.
Her mother Jane Heinrich Seed (1914-2010) was Director of the Indiana Department of Labor for Women and Children for many years. Jane lettered in five sports before graduating in 1931 from Horace Mann High School in Gary. Seed’s father Anthony was a mailman and also helped build the Alaska Highway during World War II. Her grandfather was a photographer in Northern England, as was an uncle, here, once they’d emigrated to the USA.
Seed attended Hobart (IN) High School and in the summer would take the South Shore railroad into Chicago to take classes at the Art Institute. She graduated from Indiana University in 1963 with a double major in theater and fine art. Photography was a prerequisite which she at first resisted, then found indespensible. Then she got a fellowship to the Yale Summer School of Music and Art, where there were photography teachers like the social justice photographer, Walter Rosenblum. Henry Holmes Smith (1909-1986) was the teacher at IU. He had taught photography in 1937 at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, where Art Paul also attended after World War II. “I lucked out with my teachers,” says Seed.
Right after her university years, Seed worked in theater at the Cleveland (Ohio) Playhouse and Equity Summer Stock. “Then I get a divorce and come home to be around family because I have a kid to support (Nina, born in 1961),” she said. “I go out with my portfolio and people say, ‘Gee I didn’t know there were women photographers. Nobody had seen one. People let me come in with my portfolio but they didn’t give me work. They got back to their male buddies. I’m like a talking dog.” And she laughed again Seed’s first portfolio included photographs from college projects and DIY efforts. She also self generated photo features for Chicago newspapers and magazines. “The women reporters at the Sun-Times/Daily News wanted a woman photographer,” she said. “The city news editor told them he couldn’t hire a woman photographer because she couldn’t cover a fire. So I used to go out looking for fires. And I stopped to photograph an oil truck fire (on I-94.) I knew somebody at CBS-TV. I kept saying I had spectacular pictures of an oil truck fire on I-94. They moved me around to a couple of different people but then they put it on the news as ‘spectacular pictures of an oil truck fire on I-94.’ I’d repeated that phrase just enough.”
Seed’s freelance gigs included “Aviation Graphic : Journal of the National Aeronautic Association” where she shot assorted missile bases of the Strategic Air Command. “I got to go down the missile silo,” she said. “I saw the war room. The only big advantage of being a woman photographer, at least then, was that people would do things for you. They carried your equipment. They took me to the bottom of the silo so I could get a picture looking up. The picture of them refueling into the B-51, where I had my head down in the bomb bay, I put that on my card. It was, ‘Okay you fuckers here’s what I can do’.” In the nascent years of her photography career Seed liked Nikon. “But as soon as Olympus 0M-1 came out (in 1972) it was
so lightweight I bought the whole line” she said
Seed eventually took freelance photographs for the robust Sun-Times/Daily News Book Week section. She was hired to work as a receptionist for Ann Landers. “She took me under her wing,” big time, which she did with everyone” Seed said. “She was the champion Jewish mother of all time. She told the guy at Book Week to look at my work. He liked it. Then she shifted me to the executive offices, Marshall Field. She was impossible! She told (Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist) Bill Mauldin to look at my portfolio and give me advice. He said, ‘Suzanne, anything Eppie wants she gets.’ Then he said, ‘But you should go see my friend Art Paul at Playboy.’ I said, ‘Ooh, Playboy? I didn’t know.’ He said Art was a wonderful and nice guy. And he was. So
Eppie got my career started. She found me a husband. And on my birthday she sent me to her hairdresser because she hated my Beatle cut. I tried to thank her, ‘You know, Eppie, you changed my life.’ Nothing. She didn’t want to hear it.”
Once Seed had a healthy stable of freelance clients she quit the newspaper. And got assignments from Time, Life, Glamour, CBS, and more, plus annual reports and ads.
Seed also did freelance work at times for Art Paul before they started dating. They married in 1975, with Mauldin as best man. As well as several photo illustrations, Seed photographed artist’s headshots for Playboy’s upfront Playbill section. Seed said that her theater background enabled her to direct subjects. “And Time magazine would send me to photograph people especially if they might be difficult,” she said. “They thought (author-psychiatrist) Karl Menninger was going to be difficult yet he took a shine to me, gave me his books and autographed them.” Seed also made pictures of Chicago sculptor Richard Hunt circa 1970s, Ann Landers, and Father Andrew Greeley. “Leonard Nimoy came up here (to her apartment) to be photographed,” she said. “I didn’t tell my daughter who was coming. I told her to get the door. She was stunned when she saw him.” Seed shot through an unrolled roll of acetate in front of him, side-lit, which created Star Wars-like black and white streaks.
One photographic illustration Seed did was for the 1983 Playboy short story “In Bed One Night” by Iowa author Robert Coover. The piece was about a gentleman who finds his bed filled with all kinds of people because of a glitch at the Social Security office. “I put my stepson in it,” she said with a laugh. “And my brother, who still brags that he posed for Playboy. I had to add a nude, which was I think the only model I had to hire. I used this ancient method for sepia where you do it on fabric out in the sun. You lay down all the negatives. And then you have to wash it out in the bathtub. I had a nightmare about it.” Seed’s voice dropped as she added, “I dreamed that, to wring out the unwieldy fabric, I got in the bathtub with the chemicals. Which pickled me and I was full of bumps. “Oh my god, I thought, in the dream, I’ve pickled myself, which means I’m dead as a bumpy cucumber.”
But a breakthrough project was Seed’s 1973 book “Saturday’s Child (36 Women Talk About Their Jobs) [J. Philip O’Hara, Chicago.] Seed interviewed and photographed 36 women including the Chicago sportswriter Jeannie Morris, veterinarian Lynne Carson, cab driver Margaret King and biophysicist Aida Khalafalla among others. The book is dedicated to Seed’s daughter Nina. “My daughter came home from school with a book,” she recalled. “All of the
illustrations were of boys being astronauts and such but just two pictures of girls: who were sweeping the floor and making cookies. The little boys are going to the moon, doing everything else. I said to the principal, ‘Look at this, this is a disgrace.’ He said, ‘The books are all like that. That’s what publishers do. You’re a photographer, why don’t you make a book?’ So I did.” “Saturday’s Child” stands tall with Studs Terkel’s 1972 “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.” “Saturday’s Child” won an American Library Association Award and was reprinted by Penguin.
And Nina became a hospice chaplain.
Seed’s 1979 sequel was the book “Fine Trades,” [Follett] where she photographed and interviewed men and women who worked as a piano tuner, violin maker and more.
During the early 1980s Seed obtained her MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) in film and generative systems at the School of the Art Institute. The Susan Sontag quote “Life is a movie; death is a photograph” got under her skin. It was common among critics then to denigrate photography. “This is bizarre, in what other profession do famous people say such nonsense?,” Seed said. I decided to write about it--in a scholarly way. I was angry. I wrote it as my MFA thesis.” And won the Logan Grant for it. Her essay appears in the compilation “Multiple Views (Logan Grant Essays on Photography 1983-89)” [University of New Mexico Press]. Seed writes, in part: “Media and travel are inseparable, and that images make travelers of us all. As functions of our curiosity, images are natural to us as well, an essential part of human consciousness...” In recent years Seed has been taking courses at the Chicago Dramatists and has written three long plays. One short play was produced by the NoMads Art Collective in Chicago and several have been done as readings.
Does her eye for photography inform her written words?
“If you’re an artist you should be able to do any art,” she answered. “Music, you have to practice, but art is all the same thing, really. Art is communicating. Anything I wanted to do I would jump in. You just do it.” Seed is still in the photography game. She takes pictures of neighbors and strangers in her Streeterville neighborhood. She takes unusual photos of trees because of their unique “posture,” as she defines it. “I had a mastectomy during the pandemic and I had a month of radiation,” she said. “It was a blessing that I’d walk past the MCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) and through
the park (to Prentice Women’s Hospital). It was the most beautiful park. It got me into street photography, which erased the taint of the radiation for me. I just walk up to people and say, ‘I love your look, can I photograph you?’ Nobody ever turned me down. I went with friends to India and I was fascinated by bracelets on the ankles of the babies. I’d ask people if I could photograph their baby’s feet. (laughs.) Nobody said no. I have pictures of 20 window washers from my pandemic project. I’d hear them coming, grab my camera. They have 18 seconds between floors. I’d run to the window and knock on the window. They’d smile while working. And while I took pictures of them, a couple of times they’d take pictures of me. Sometimes they
pose.
With people, I sometimes think that as a photographer it’s helped that I’m a woman. Also, I seem to have an honest face. The only place I got asked for my ID was when I photographed (the Triple Crown winning horse) Secretariat at Arlington Park.
Seed is working on the book “Prairie Dragons” which depicts industrial landscapes counterpointed with wild nature informed by her Northwest Indiana roots. “You get romantic about these industrial landscapes,” she explained. “They are magical and kind of scary. And any friend of mine who happens to be an actor, if they need headshots I’ll do it for free. I miss doing that. I want to see if I can still do it. It gives me a thrill to really capture a personality in photos.”
Her recent shows of high-rise photography are something of a coming-out period for her after working diligently on Art Paul’s archives after his death. “At Noyes (cultural arts center) Angela Adams said, ‘You’re spending all this time on what Art has done and nobody is paying attention to what you’ve done. Hattula Moholy-Nagy (daughter of Hungarian photographer/Bauhaus professor Lazlo Moholy-Nagy) called the responsibilities we felt as “keeping of the flame.” I guess we’re all keepers of the flame.
“But I am starting to wonder what I’m going to do with all my artwork. It’s in my closet. Thousands of images. My children don’t know what they’re looking at. It’s like my husband’s archives. I’m the only person who knows what they’re looking at. There’s nobody alive to do it. And I haven’t paid attention to how my work might be remembered. I’ve just wanted to do my work and not do the business part, which is what I once scolded my husband for doing with his own work. And now I’m doing that same thing he did.”
----Dave Hoekstra
