APA San Diego & MOPA Present Bruce Talamon ‘A love letter to the Music’

APA San Diego & MOPA welcome Bruce Talamon for a photographic talk and presentation discussing his book ‘Soul R&B Funk from 1972-1982’. Talamon will share stories from behind the camera while covering various artists such as James Brown, Donna Summer, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder.

About Bruce W. Talamon:

Bruce is a photographer from California. He grew up in South Central Los Angeles. His cameras took him around the world. Music, Editorial, Movies. He worked for People Magazine and was a Contract Photographer for Time Magazine. For forty-one years, he worked in the film industry as a Motion Picture Stills Photographer.

But before that, he photographed R&B Royalty from 1972-1982. It changed his life. On September 12, 2018, Taschen Books published BRUCE W. TALAMON: Soul, R&B and Funk Photographs 1972-1982. There have been numerous photo books on Jazz, Rock & Roll, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Elvis, and Dylan. There has never been a photo book published on Soul, R&B and Funk Music… until now.

Taking a photograph of a singer on stage is the easy part. The hard part is gaining the trust. From 1972-1982, Bruce Talamon was documenting the rehearsals and sound checks, the recording sessions and costume fittings, the quiet moments, life on the road, and of course the wild photo sessions and memorable performances.

Alone with the artists before taking the stage, or seconds after the last song, Bruce Talamon had total access and was never asked to put his camera down. He was there when they exhaled. From the smoke filled clubs on Crenshaw Boulevard and the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, to the largest arenas across the world, his camera recorded the frenzy and beauty of the music. He photographed all the usual subjects.

With almost 300 photographs, personal reflections and two essays, this book is a love letter to the music. It is a visual period in Black Music that lasted way past the midnight hour and will never come again.

Bruce Talamon’s work has been exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum, Corcoran Museum, Grammy Museum, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Museum, Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) in Madrid, Spain.

2019 was a busy year. He completed his third film for Tom Hanks as his Stills Photographer on the Universal Pictures feature film “News Of The World”, directed by Paul Greengrass. He was invited to join the Fahey / Klein Photo Gallery in Los Angeles and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC selected his photograph of Earth Wind & Fire as one of six portraits for the 2019 Portrait of A Nation Prize.

Currently, he is researching the visual legacy of African American photographers during WWII. He is also editing a book project celebrating African American Stills Photographers in the Motion Picture Industry.