Bullock, Wynn

Wynn Bullock, (born April 18, 1902, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died November 16, 1975, Monterey, California), American photographer who conveyed a psychological truth beneath the realism of his images.

Bullock moved to New York City in the early 1920s to study voice at Columbia University and to pursue a career as a concert tenor. While traveling throughout Europe, he was exposed to developments in the visual arts. Upon his return to the United States in 1931, he briefly studied law; however, he decided that his vocation lay in photography and instead enrolled at the Los Angeles Art Center from 1938 to 1940. Bullock’s early work—mainly solarizations, in which the image is partly negative and partly positive—was strongly influenced by the avant-garde experiments of László Moholy-Nagy. His first one-man exhibition, held in 1941 at the Los Angeles County Museum, was a critical success.

In 1948 Bullock met photographer Edward Weston, who persuaded him that realism and tonal beauty were photography’s most valuable assets. Bullock changed his own style and strictly followed Weston’s teachings. Much of his work from that point on closely resembles Weston’s, especially in his choice of seascapes, landscapes, and nudes as subject matter. Bullock was very focused on the meaning behind such subject matter. He often intended his realistic images to be viewed as “equivalents,” photographic images that serve as visual metaphors for larger ideas, such as the passing of time and the inevitability of death. Occasionally, he treated these themes surrealistically in prints such as Child in the Forest (1954), one of two of Bullock’s photographs that were central parts of “The Family of Man,” the landmark 1955 exhibition organized by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.