Rupert Truman

Photographer / Creative director

I’ve been taking pictures for as long as I can remember…  As a teenager, I had a passion for black & white photography – my father had a Kodak rangefinder camera, and an enlarger that he’d bought in Chile in the 1950’s.  This was my introduction.  I began processing film and printing the results.  I never imagined that I could work as a photographer.

After finishing a degree in Geology, I had an existential crisis, realised I didn’t want to spend my life as a geologist, bought a lovely wooden Wista 5″x4″ field camera and started shooting architecture.  I did alot of work with the Architects’ Journal, the National Trust, and a bunch of architects.

StormStudios
A friend was working with Storm Thorgerson, the ground breaking album cover designer, whose artwork (largely photographed by Aubrey Powell) adorned most of my record collection without my realising it.  I began working with Storm in the early 1980’s and worked more and more with him, shooting 99% of the studio’s output from the late 80’s.

In 2003 Storm had a huge stroke.  Despite his disability, we continued to travel the world, shooting and putting on exhibitions, from Mexico to Chicago, Sydney, Italy etc etc.

Sadly Storm died in 2013.  He left the studio to three of his closest colleagues – Dan Abbott, Peter Curzon and myself.  We continue as StormStudios, doing whatever comes our way.

Fine Art Prints
Much of StormStudios art is available as limited edition fine art prints which we’ve exhibited all around the globe – London, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cape Town, Norway, Sydney, Melbourne, Belgium, Italy (Milan and Fuchechio), Mexico and more…  The prints are available at our online store.

Film
Outside the studio, Storm and I were making a film about Syd Barrett (founder and guiding light of the Pink Floyd, and school friend of Storm and Roger Waters), half of which he left to me.  The direction of this has been handed to Roddy Bogawa, who made the documentary about Storm, Taken by Storm (that’s my footage of Storm underwater on the front page…).  Orian Williams (made the award winning ‘Control’, the docu-drama about Ian Curtis, the front man from Joy Division) is on board as our producer.   With the working title ‘Have You Got It Yet’, it is currently being edited.  It should (subject to agreements for music and film footage), be screened in 2016.  For updates, see our Facebook page.

Storm had no concept of the boundaries of what one could and could not do, so when we made a pop promo on 35mm film – he just asked me to do it – so I did.

My introduction to film making was as second camera with Storm making a documentary about UFO’s.  We travelled all over the USA interviewing all sorts of fascinating people (scientists from SETI, NASA, Fermilab, abductees, a hollywood designer of aliens etc).

Books
Storm and I travelled to Cuba and spent a few weeks shooting cars for a book on the design of the lovely old american cars stuck in the time warp of Cuba, ‘Riding Along In My Automobile‘. The photos in my gallery are mainly the images I took for myself rather than the tightly defined images that Storm wanted for the book (Front, side, detail).

The studio has made many books on Storm and the studio’s design, the last being ‘The Gathering Storm‘, which has just been republished by Insight Books in the USA.  This covers Storm’s entire career from the late 60’s and through the 70’s with Hipgnosis, with the second half largely my imagery during the period that Storm headed StormStudios.

I spent several weeks photographing the fantastic unfinished Gaudi cathedral in Barcelona for a Masters of Building article for the Architects’ Journal.  I went back to take more photographs for the Phaidon book ‘The Expiatory Church of the Sagrada Familia‘.

Documentary Photography
In recent years, I’ve been rediscovering  my first love – documentary photography.  The Cuban car images on this site are an expression of that, as are of course, the documentary sections, and portrait sections.

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