London’s Proud Central has a reputation for showing great photographs of musicians, so it’s no surprise to find these wonderful portraits of Ray Charles, Mick Jagger, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe and the like on the walls. Few of the photographers who’ve shown here, however, have backgrounds as interesting as Norman Seeff’s: born in 1939 in South Africa, he spent years working as an A&E doctor in Soweto before moving to New York in the late 1960s to pursue his passion for photography. By 1973, he had his own photography studio on Los Angeles’s famous Sunset Boulevard and was busy shooting portraits of musical superstars in his honest, inimitable style. He always strives to reach, he says, ‘a place with my subjects that defines pure presence, where we can stand and just look at each other without any filters’; now you can reach that place also.

More information at: Proud Central