Bob Seidemann, a Haight Street hipster who cared little for rock music but loved the freewheeling cultural scene of 1960s San Francisco, where he photographed Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead and went on to design more than 50 album covers, including a controversial image of a shirtless 11-year-old girl for the supergroup Blind Faith, died Nov. 27 at his home in Vallejo, California. He was 75.

He had Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Belinda Seidemann.

Seidemann was working on commercial photo shoots in New York – herding sheep into freight elevators and posing baby chickens for barnyard-themed calendars – when he heard that people were dropping LSD and embracing free love in San Francisco.

He soon headed west to join them, immersing himself in what he called the “freak” scene of the city’s Haight-Ashbury and North Beach neighborhoods, where he befriended and soon began photographing members of the Grateful Dead and Joplin’s band, Big Brother and the Holding Company.

“To be honest with you, I wasn’t very interested in the music,” he told the website Collectors Weekly in 2015. “It was the scene, you know? I didn’t intend to become a documentarian; I was just hanging out, a friend of these people. I had a little bit of skill with the camera, able to do stuff that did not require a lot of expertise. As their work progressed, so did mine.”

Seidemann went on to photograph album covers for acts including singers Randy Newman and Gladys Knight, jazz musician Herbie Hancock, and rock music’s Bob Seger and Neil Young. He also spent 15 years taking artistic black-and-white photos of aging airplanes and historic figures in aviation, including World War II aviator James Doolittle and test pilot Chuck Yeager.

But he remained best known for his highly conceptual late-’60s rock photos, which captured the brazen sexuality of the Summer of Love and what Seidemann later described as “the golden calf of the moment” – the American rock star.

He took one of the best-known photos of the Grateful Dead, positioning guitarist Jerry Garcia and other band members on a sloping stretch of cookie-cutter houses in Daly City, California, in 1967. Police broke up the first attempt at a photo, but on a second try Seidemann applied a red filter to darken the sky and employed five mirror-wielding assistants to shine light into the faces of the Dead.

The result was an eerie juxtaposition of strait-laced suburbia and five men who looked, Seidemann said, like “mutant transplants from Jupiter, fresh out of their flying saucer.” It was soon turned into a top-selling poster, plastered on telephone poles and storefront windows across the Bay Area.

That same year, Seidemann took a pair of widely replicated portraits of Joplin, showing her in the first image wearing nothing but a cape and long strings of beads. “At the end of the photo session she wanted to take her clothes off,” Belinda Seidemann said. The resulting seminude image, with an earnest, bead-draped Joplin standing with her hands positioned over her groin, became a defining photo of the singer when it was published in Rolling Stone after Joplin’s death in 1970.

Seidemann maintained a close friendship with rocker Eric Clapton, who encouraged him to move to London in the late 1960s and commissioned him to devise an album cover for his new super group, a then-nameless outfit that featured Ginger Baker, who had played with Clapton in Cream, alongside Steve Winwood of Traffic and Ric Grech of Family.

The band didn’t last, breaking up after one tour and a single record in 1969. Yet the cover art of its self-titled record – “Blind Faith,” a name coined by Seidemann – proved enduring, in part for the surrealistic quality of its image and for the criticism it engendered from those who saw phallic imagery and child pornography. For the record’s second printing, the image was replaced with a photo Seidemann had taken of the band at Clapton’s apartment.

Seidemann later wrote that he had intended the artwork to evoke childlike innocence and optimism toward new technologies, symbolized by a naked girl on a grassy hillside holding a spaceshiplike object in her hand.

For the girl, Seidemann sought someone with “that singular flare of radiant innocence” – a young woman who was not too old to be “cheesecake,” and not young enough that her nudity meant “nothing.”

Seidemann eventually found Mariora Goschen, whose parents gave their permission and who had only one stipulation. For payment, she wanted “a young horse.” Years later, Goschen told Britain’s Independent newspaper that she received 40 pounds but was “still waiting for Eric Clapton to ring me about the horse.”

Robert Emett Seidemann was born in Manhattan on Dec. 28, 1941, and grew up in Queens, near what is now LaGuardia Airport. He struggled to read because of learning disabilities and graduated from a vocational school, the Manhattan High School of Aviation Trades.

A delivery job at a Manhattan photo lab led him to develop an interest in photography.

In addition to his wife of 37 years, the former Belinda Bryant of Vallejo, survivors include a younger brother.

Seidemann described his aviation series, “Airplane as Art,” part of the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, as his greatest achievement. But he also acknowledged an “almost miraculous quality” in his Blind Faith image.

“When I saw it on the retoucher’s table I felt a shock as if I had been struck by somebody,” he told the Independent, “a sense of detachment that was almost transcendental.”