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WYNN BULLOCK

Naturally

ONLINE EXHIBITION

April 22 – June 30, 2021

Wyn Bullock Seascape, 1955
Boy Fishing, 1959
The Pilings, 1958
Lynne, Point Lobos, 1956
Wynn Bullock The Mast, Cannery Row, 1968
Wynn Bullock Cactus, 1958
Woman and Dog in Forest, 1953
Child and the Unknown, 1955
Point Lobos Rock, 1970
Rock, 1971
Woman on Dunes, 1972
Barbara through Window, 1956

Press Release

WYNN BULLOCK — NATURALLY
ONLINE EXHIBITION

Laurence Miller Gallery is pleased to announce our East Coast representation of the Bullock Family Photography Estate. 

To inaugurate this partnership, we present this selection of original gelatin silver prints by Wynn Bullock from the archives of the Bullock family. With this impeccable provenance, collectors and curators can have the confidence that all of these prints were made in Wynn Bullock's darkroom during his lifetime — many are among the last vintage and early prints to be made available of these images. 

Wynn Bullock was profoundly inspired by fellow photographer Edward Weston whom he met in 1948. Weston’s early mentorship guided Bullock's reverent visual explorations of the landscape around the Central Coast of California. He began introducing the human figure into his landscape photography in the 1950s, and this proved to be instrumental in developing his own unique voice as an artist. What emerged was a vision of human beings nested within a natural world that is at once wondrous and mysterious. 

Bullock said that by photographing figures within his landscapes “I stopped thinking in terms of objects. I was seeing things instead as dynamic events, unique in their own beings yet also related and existing together within a universal context of energy and change.” Bullock’s pictures are both tied to a particular time and place while at the same time speaking in universal terms. His embrace of nature as a source of profound truths is indelibly linked to the artistic communities that were drawn to the rugged beauty of the coastal landscape around Big Sur in California.

Wynn Bullock’s photographs offer us wise counsel — suggesting that to seek to understand nature is to seek to understand ourselves, and that true harmony is embracing the truth that we are one and the same thing.

 

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 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.

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.