Bruce W. Talamon. Soul. R&B. Funk. Photographs 1972–1982

It is a heavy thing, this volume, the kind of TASCHEN production that lands on a table with a thud and reorganizes the room around it. Hundreds of pages, generous margins, black-and-white backstage frames set against stage shots that bloom into full color. The design hands Bruce Talamon's decade of soul, funk, and R&B the physical presence of an event, which is exactly right, because the decade it documents was one long event.

What did real access to Black American music actually look like in the 1970s, before laminated passes and thirty-foot security buffers turned the backstage into a fortress? It looked like Talamon. Between 1972 and 1982 he stood where almost no one else was standing: in the wings with Marvin Gaye, in the studio air around Bob Marley, close enough to Earth, Wind and Fire to catch the sweat under the stage light. The access is the foundation of everything here, and it was earned rather than issued.

Trust is visible in the pictures, which is what separates them from ordinary concert coverage. Performers who have learned to armor themselves against a lens get caught here with the armor off: a quiet moment alone in a dressing room, a burst of unguarded laughter, the specific exhaustion of the hour after a two-hour set. Talamon was not parachuted in for a single show and then escorted out. He was around, part of the scene, and the intimacy that buys is the thing you cannot fake with a long lens and a photo pit.

The split between color and black and white is doing quiet, deliberate work. The stage images run hot: a bandleader mid-drop, a horn section frozen in full cry, a singer lit from below in a wash of gelled red, all of it saturated to match the sheer volume of the music. Backstage goes monochrome and drops the temperature, and in that cooler register the famous faces become people again. Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Al Green, Chaka Khan: the roll call is a who's-who of the era, and the pictures pointedly refuse to treat any of them as a monument. They are workers, photographed at work.

Consider the live frames on their own terms, because shooting a concert well is far harder than the results make it look. The light is somebody else's decision and it changes by the second, the subject refuses to hold still for anyone, and the good moment announces itself a fraction of a second before it is gone. Talamon reads a stage the way a sports photographer reads a field, anticipating the drop, the spin, the arms flung wide, firing a beat early so the frame lands exactly on the peak. The keepers look inevitable, which is the surest sign of someone who missed a thousand others and has the taste never to show you those. A studio shooter who assumes available-light work is the soft option should study how much control is hiding inside these apparently spontaneous pictures.

There is a documentary weight to the whole project that outgrows the music. This was the last decade before MTV rewired how a performer was allowed to be seen, before the image got centralized and controlled, and Talamon happened to be standing inside it with a camera and an open invitation. The result is a record of a scene photographing itself in real time, made from the inside by someone the scene had decided to let in. Historians of the period will find faces and back rooms here that survive nowhere else, because the person holding the camera was a participant and not a visitor.

If there is a reservation, it is that the sheer abundance can flatten the highs. Two hundred nights start to resemble one long night, and a handful of the concert frames are documentation more than revelation, present to complete a record rather than to stop you cold. The reward comes from staying with the quiet ones, the backstage frames where nothing is happening except a person being briefly, unmistakably real.

Set it open to one of those dressing-room pictures the next time a musician books your studio and shows up guarded, certain that a camera is a threat to be managed. Point to the frame. There is the proof that the strongest pictures of performers arrive after the performance stops, and that the only way to earn that moment is to be trusted enough to still be standing there when it finally comes.