Tina Turner (1939–2023)

Born Anna Mae Bullock in Brownsville, Tennessee, Tina Turner’s musical career spanned 66 years and multiple genres. She transformed the role of female vocalist to include a palette of timbres and techniques that, until then, had been primarily associated with Black male performers. During her tenure with The Ike & Tina Turner Revue, as well as in her subsequent solo career, her covers of existing repertoire turned songs like “Honky Tonk Woman” into entirely new works, sometimes featuring rewritten lyrics to reflect a female perspective. She won multiple Grammys, including Record of the Year in 1985 for “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” was featured on the second cover of Rolling Stone magazine, and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2021. This photograph was taken at the Honka Monka Club in Queens, New York, by photographer Bob Gruen, just before he began working professionally. Among Gruen’s many photographs of Turner, this one is notable for its representation of the dynamics of Turner’s performance, as well as how the venue’s strobe light causes her figure to be captured several times in a single frame—a kind of spontaneous nightclub stroboscopic motion photography.