LaMonte McLemore, a founding member of the 5th Dimension who split his life between harmonies and photographs, died on Feb. 3 at 90. He helped shape a crossover pop-soul sound that dominated charts and quietly rewrote how Black musicians and everyday Black life were seen in mainstream media.
A craftsman in two mediums
McLemore was rare: equally at home arranging vocal parts in the studio and composing portraits behind a lens. As a performer he contributed to the lush, radio-ready harmonies that defined the 5th Dimension’s “champagne soul.” As a photographer he treated subjects—fellow artists and ordinary people alike—with a careful, humane eye. Those parallel practices fed one another: stage sense informed his sense of presence in portraiture, and a photographer’s focus sharpened the group’s public image.
Shaping a new pop-soul identity
The 5th Dimension blended gospel-rooted phrasing, tight ensemble singing, and pop production to reach broad audiences without erasing its musical roots. McLemore’s visual instincts helped lock that sound into a consistent look—tasteful wardrobe choices, thoughtfully staged promotional photos and a steady visual narrative that matched the band’s polished yet soulful music. Hits like the medley “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” and the ballad “One Less Bell to Answer” brought commercial success; McLemore’s imagery helped make that success feel inevitable on television and album sleeves alike.
A parallel career behind the camera
While touring and recording, McLemore kept working as a photographer. Trained as a medical photographer, he brought technical rigor to his portraits—clean framing, direct lighting and quick, confident direction. He photographed peers such as Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, contributed to national publications and is believed to have been among the early Black photographers to work for Harper’s Bazaar. His most enduring photographic legacy is a long collaboration with Jet magazine, where his “Beauty of the Week” portraits highlighted more than 500 women drawn from everyday life. Those images shifted the conversation: they centered Black beauty and desire at a moment when mainstream media too often ignored them.
Style and impact
McLemore’s approach was straightforward but powerful. He favored small interventions—a turned shoulder, a hand on a hip, a splash of water—to transform a pose into a story. His pictures combined formal clarity with unforced dignity, pushing against narrow beauty standards and helping normalize diverse representations in glossy pages and later digital spaces. Photographers and editors who followed adopted similar tactics to broaden who could be seen as desirable or iconic.
Personal rhythm and later work
Colleagues remembered McLemore for a steady warmth that put subjects at ease and for a workmanlike craft that produced consistent, repeatable results. He often joked that he carried a microphone in one hand and a camera in the other—an apt image of a life split between sound and sight. Raised by his mother and grandmother, he credited that upbringing with a collaborative spirit that informed both his music-making and his photographic practice. After the band’s peak years in the 1960s and ’70s, he continued to tour intermittently, to produce editorial work and to document the group’s history in his memoir From Hobo Flats to the 5th Dimension.
Legacy and memory
McLemore’s photographs and recordings remain reference points for artists, scholars and curators who study representation, crossover success and the visual strategies of popular music. Renewed interest in archival culture—and the broader reevaluation of Black artistic contributions—has brought his work back into view, including exposure through film and documentary projects that reframe those decades for new audiences.
He is survived by his wife, Mieko Tone (married 1995); a daughter, Ciara McLemore; a son, Darin; a sister; and three grandchildren. His death followed complications stemming from an earlier stroke. The family has not announced public arrangements.
McLemore’s gifts were quiet but far-reaching: he helped craft songs that entered the public soundtrack and photographs that quietly altered who was allowed to occupy the center of a picture. Both legacies—sonic and visual—remain part of the story of American popular culture.