Wynn Bullock

Wynn Bullock (1902 – 1975) was born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in South Pasadena, California. During the mid-1920s, while performing as a concert singer in Europe, he became fascinated with the photographs of Man Ray and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. Bullock bought a simple box camera and began shooting pictures of his own.

In 1938 Bullock enrolled at the Los Angeles Art Center School. His work received early recognition in 1941, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art staged his first solo exhibition.  Bullock was deeply inspired by fellow photographer Edward Weston, who he met in 1948, and Weston’s mentorship inspired his early explorations of landscape photography. Throughout the decade of the 50s, Wynn devoted himself to establishing deep, direct connections with nature in and around the Central Coast of California. 

Bullock achieved international recognition when, in 1955, two of his photographs were selected by curator Edward Steichen for MoMA’s famous Family of Man exhibition in 1955. The exhibition traveled to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and his photographs Let There Be Light, and Child in Forest, became known as some of the exhibition’s most memorable images. By the end of that decade, his work was widely exhibited and published worldwide.

During the early 1960s, Bullock departed from the black-and-white photography and produced a major body of work, Color Light Abstractions. He was ultimately frustrated by the limitations of color printing technology and returned to making black and white photographs. His last photographs in the 1970s were a search for human spirits and forms within the natural word

Bullock was one of the five founding photographers whose archives established the Center for Creative Photography in 1975. Recognized as a master mid-twentieth century artist, his work is also featured in the permanent collections of over a hundred institutions throughout the world.