This exhibition represents the most comprehensive assessment of photographer Wynn Bullock’s (American, 1902-1975) extraordinary career in nearly forty years. Bullock worked in the American modernist tradition alongside colleagues and friends Edward Weston, Harry Callahan, and Ansel Adams. This show presents the rare opportunity to see over 100 works of art by this innovative photographer.
Past Exhibition
Wynn Bullock: Revelations
June 14, 2014 – January 18, 2015
Del Monte Forest, 1956
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Collection of the Center for Creative PhotographyAmong the scientific concepts that Bullock found compelling was the idea that, contrary to typical experience, space is as much about fullness as it is about absence. Within earth’s atmosphere, air and light fill the apparent emptiness of our environment, constantly enveloping us. And outer space, although devoid of an atmosphere, is filled with electromagnetic radiation. Bullock often expressed his awareness of this concept in his pictures, creating images of forests and hillsides that are heavily laden with fog, and often composing pictures in which his frames are filled to the brim with material.
Del Monte Forest, 1969
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
Erosion, 1959
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative PhotographyBullock found this scene along a California roadway and was drawn to the insight it provides into what goes on in spaces that normally lie beyond our perception. The eroded embankment reveals the slow evolution of the world across centuries, with organic and inorganic elements coexisting together at different stages of growth and decay. Stripped of its skin and flayed by the corrosive power of water, the hill in Bullock’s picture reveals a powerfully foreign world as real and as beautiful as anything on the surface of the earth. Bullock’s efforts were decidedly pointed toward making the ordinary profound and in revealing a complexity beyond the surface of things.
Stark Tree, 1956
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative PhotographyThe sun and its dramatically cast rays appear often in Bullock’s depictions of the California landscape from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Whether hovering over seascapes, piercing through the fog of a hillside scene, or illuminating the foliage in a forest, the sun held meanings for Bullock that transcended its importance as a compositional device. Light held meaning for Bullock beyond its mere aesthetic and emotive qualities. Just as Einstein saw in light a universal constant, Bullock believed it to be a “force with roots of meaning that relate to the very existence of things.”
Let There Be Light, 1954
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative PhotographyIn this quietly dramatic image Bullock captures the sun hanging low over the sea, causing a narrow band of brilliant light to reflect across the water in contrast with a deeply shadowed landscape and darkened sky. Prominently featured in Edward Steichen’s renowned photography exhibition The Family of Man, this picture helped to propel Bullock to fame in the 1950s. The work was voted the most outstanding photograph in the show by a majority of visitors while at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The image originally had a different title, but was permanently renamed as a result of Steichen’s pairing it with a passage from the Bible.
Lynne, Logs, and Doll, 1958
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
Child in Forest, 1951
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art Purchase
1978.62Bullock’s iconic photograph of his daughter Barbara lying in a forest floor gained international acclaim for its prominent inclusion in Edward Steichen’s blockbuster exhibition The Family of Man, which toured the globe for eight years as one of the most successful and popular photography exhibitions in history. The image is at once beautiful and enigmatic. In its forms, one discerns a whole host of dualities that drove the artist’s engagement with the event: enveloped by an ancient forest, the young girl exists as a part of and apart from everything that surrounds her. Her soft flesh opposes rough wood, consciousness intersects with inanimate life, new growth meets decay, and darkness commingles with light. The fact that the figure is unclothed serves as a reminder of humanity’s unity with the natural world.
Lynne, Point Lobos, 1956
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography
A Child’s Grief, 1955
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography
Clarence John Laughlin and Edna’s Hand, early 1950s
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Barbara and Gene Bullock-WilsonFamily and friends often served as Bullock’s models. Here the silhouette of Bullock’s colleague the photographer Clarence John Laughlin can be seen framed between two windows inside this humble wooden structure. Meanwhile, Bullock’s wife Edna stands largely hidden beyond the open doorway, her hand wrapping around the threshold into the light and lending the scene a mysteriously surreal quality.
Nude by Sandy’s Window, 1956
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative PhotographyIn this picture, a brightly lit window occupies the bulk of Bullock’s composition, hovering over a woman who appears to be asleep; light shines in through the glass with a blinding intensity that obscures a clear view of the exterior while alluding to the existence of a world of indefinite proportions beyond.
Reticulation Abstraction, 1951
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-WilsonAn obscure technique that occupied Bullock during his formative years was that of reticulation. By exposing his negatives to temperature variations while processing the film, he was able to create negatives with surfaces scored by a network of cracks and wrinkles. An inherently unpredictable process, reticulation makes the element of chance a powerful ingredient in the creative process. In this image, the process generated an abstract composition with a dynamic surface texture.
Light Abstraction, 1939
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography
Early Solarization, 1940
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Barbara and Gene Bullock-WilsonAs a student of photography early in his career at the Los Angeles Art Center School, Bullock’s work was deeply experimental. Drawing direct inspiration from the work of Man Ray and Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Bullock began manipulating tones in his photographs through solarization, a method of subjecting pictures to pulses of light in the processing and printing stages. As a result his models appear otherworldly, sometimes with skin the texture of marble. The subjects inhabit an eerie environment with no contextual cues as to place or time.
Navigation without Numbers, 1957
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative PhotographyOne of Bullock’s most popular and enigmatic photographs, Navigation without Numbers conveys a tension between beauty and disturbance and enlightenment and mystery. The room that this mother and child inhabit appears simultaneously inviting and rugged. Below the window sits a nautical book, the title of which gives the picture its name, describing how to pilot through dark waters. Bullock photographed and printed the scene to conjure a feeling of the dimensional disorientation one might sense on a nighttime sea voyage. The contours of the bed fall into shadow so the child appears suspended in space. The figures suggest basic dualities in the cycle of life: youth and old age, growth and maturation, connection and isolation. They appear to exist in multiple frames of reference simultaneously, captured within a dreamworld while physically situated within a humble home.
Edna, 1956
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
Old Typewriter, 1951
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
2012.594Bullock considered the phenomenon of time one of the most significant truths in the universe. In this series of pictures, he repeatedly explored that great force in oblique ways. Whether capturing a discarded typewriter decomposing into the land around it, a lounge chair rusting in the artist’s backyard, or the growth of an enormous tree slowly overtaking the concrete and iron barrier built to contain it, he addressed the passage of time by focusing on evidence of decay. Bullock’s pictures in this vein remind us of the inevitable process of transfiguration across the universe and serve as reaffirmations of the greatest unified duality of all, that of life and death.
Point Lobos Tide Pools, 1972
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Barbara and Gene Bullock-WilsonIn Point Lobos Tide Pools, Bullock managed to transform a relatively banal and accessible image of a rock and tide pool formation into a wonderfully abstract composition simply by turning the image upside down. If this image is rotated to view it from its original, right-side-up orientation, the recession of space along a rocky outcropping becomes immediately apparent. But in the orientation in which the artist intended the viewer to see the photograph, the forms become abstract and hardly recognizable.
Rock Reversal, 1971
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
Pebble Beach, 1970
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
Tree Trunk, 1971
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Promised Gift of Lynne Harrington-BullockTo create this image, Bullock reversed the positive and negative values of his rendering of a tree trunk, and then turned the composition upside down. In so doing, he disrupts a habitual reading of the natural world, creates an experience of disorientation, and allows the forms pictured to engage the eye in freshly invigorating ways.
Color Light Abstraction 1075, Early 1960s
Wynn Bullock
Inkjet print
Promised gift of Bullock Family Photography LLC
Color Light Abstraction 1076, 1963
Wynn Bullock
Inkjet print
Promised gift of Bullock Family Photography LLC
Self-Portrait, 1971
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
Boy at Sandy’s, 1957
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
Sea Palms, 1968
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-WilsonBullock experimented with intermittent exposure and a disorienting perspective to render a landscape with mysteriously ambiguous scale. At first glance, the sea palms appear to be full-size trees sitting atop a fog-filled, rocky gorge, rather than, as they really are, kelp plants clinging to tidal rocks as waves continually wash over them. By leaving his camera lens open while waves washed repeatedly over the scene, Bullock made visible a reality that existed across time, rather than at a single point in time. Photography gave Bullock the “power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, ‘this is real, too.’”
Under Monterey Wharf, 1969
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography
Driftwood, 1951
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
The Shore, 1966
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
Point Lobos Tide Pool, 1957
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative PhotographyPoint Lobos Tide Pool appears simultaneously to resemble both a galaxy and a bacterial growth across a petri dish, when in fact it is neither so large nor so small a subject, but rather a pool arrayed with microorganisms along the Carmel coast, transformed into a picture of astounding beauty.
Rock, 1973
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
Point Lobos Rock, 1973
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
Untitled #1, 1972
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative PhotographyLate in life, Bullock found something unexpected in still-life subjects in the vicinity of his home. Again and again he captured what appear to be humanoid forms embedded in natural materials, including blocks of wood, stones, fallen trees, and sliced fruit. As he noted, “Mysteries lie all around us, even in the most familiar of things, waiting only to be perceived.” For Bullock, there was more to the world than what first meets the eye; reality was as much about how people looks at the world as where they look.
Edna, 1956
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
Photogram, 1970
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Barbara and Gene Bullock-WilsonFor this photogram (photograph made without a camera), Bullock sandwiched ink between two plates of glass, which were then used as negatives to print abstract imagery that is reminiscent of natural forms.
Self-Portrait, 1971
Wynn Bullock
Gelatin silver print
Promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
Overview
The arc of Bullock’s innovative achievements is surveyed in Wynn Bullock: Revelations through more than 100 prints, from his early experimental work of the 1940s, through the mysterious black-and-white imagery of the 1950s and color light abstractions of the 1960s, to his late metaphysical photographs of the 1970s. Wynn Bullock: Revelations coincides with a major gift from the Bullock Estate to the High Museum, making Atlanta one of the largest repositories of Bullock’s work in the country.
Bullock’s work was guided by an intense interest in the mid-twentieth-century dialogue about the structure of the universe and humanity’s place within it. Drawn to the spirit of experimentation that marked scientific and philosophic endeavors of his day, Bullock used knowledge about quantum physics, special relativity, and the space-time continuum as a reference point for his own intuitive and deeply personal explorations of the world. Photography for Bullock was a way of meditating on the frightening and exhilarating idea that there is much more to the world than is commonly understood through ordinary perception, and he was passionate about conveying that revelation to others through his work.
Visit the Wynn Bullock Photography Website
Color Light Abstractions
In the 1960s, Bullock’s attraction to the phenomenon of light became more overt in an innovative series of color abstractions. To create these stunning and unusual images, Bullock constructed an apparatus with notches cut into one side. Up to ten layers of glass rested horizontally in the notches. On the glass he placed various materials – a jar of honey, shards of glass, colored cellophane – that refracted light in spectacular ways. Bullock surrounded the whole structure with floodlights, spotlights, and prisms, and manipulated items to create compelling arrangements of light while peering at his composition through the ground glass of his camera. In most cases, he photographed not the objects themselves, but rather their effects in space. Particularly exciting to the artist was the concept that light could be used as an abstract medium in photography, allowing for a plasticity more often associated with other arts.
The mesmerizing color images that resulted from Bullock’s concentrated, multiyear effort to record light abstractions were quite literally ahead of their time. While they bear a resemblance to images of outer space taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, no such inspirational images were available to Bullock during his life. And like other photographers experimenting with color photography in the 1960s, Bullock struggled to find ways of presenting his work satisfactorily. Unhappy with most of the color printing papers available to him, he often resorted instead to projecting the images onto walls via color slides – a practice that left his archive with hundreds of transparencies but little in the way of vintage color prints, thus obscuring until recently the importance of this work in the larger scheme of his career.