Second-guessing ‘straight’ photography

Although they all photographed with similar cameras and in similar environments, Bullock’s work seems to pose the greatest problems for so-called ‘straight’ photography. “Of the three, Bullock’s work is by far the most haunting and reflective, evoking an interior landscape of qualities and forces rather than an outer world of literal places and things.”

Bullock was almost forty before deciding on a career in photography. He then pursued commercial and personal projects for over a decade before being deeply affected by the work of Edward Weston, who became both mentor and friend, providing the formative influence for the artist’s shift from so-called alternative techniques to ‘straight photography’.

This debt to Weston’s oeuvre will be immediately evident to people familiar with his work. Regardless of subject matter, each image is superbly balanced, with subtle light and dense tonal details, making one appreciate fine-art photography’s reverence for the ‘original print’. Those eager to see the depth of photographic printing techniques, on this point already, will be well rewarded.

In Driftwood Tree Trunk, 1951; a signature work taken with a long exposure, the dark contorted highlights of the smooth wet driftwood contrast heavily with the blurred waves in the background. The wood is rendered more like solidified lava, displaying a kind arrested or petrified intensity that suggests it may bubble back into fluid life at any moment. Indeed the lush refined surface detail of Bullock’s work often conjures up a surreal quality in what may otherwise seem banal or lifeless subject matter.

While the images in this exhibition were taken from the early 1950s to 1970s, decades of profound social change, there is nothing in Bullock’s work which strives to describe the era in which it was produced, as one can find in the work of Walker Evans. Images of disproportionately small children, at times naked, dwarfed by their ‘natural’ surroundings, (Child In Forest, 1951 for example) are just as uncanny today as they would have been fifty years ago. They also escape being merely sentimental.

Bullock brought a very personal vision to his use of the camera, saying he took photographs so as to pose questions to the visible world. He later wrote that many of his photographs responded, in a familiar environment, to profound abstract questions of philosophy, semantics and metaphysics – in the work of Einstein, Alfred Korzybski, Bertrand Russell, Paul Klee, Kandinsky, the Dao of Lao Zi and others – subjects that he studied throughout his life. This feeling of enquiry and suggestion piques the interest and lingers after each image, second-guessing one’s assertions on the subject matter or photographer’s intentions.

In more complex images, such as a number of 1950s nudes in the California forests near his home, this questioning – of the subject, the photographer’s gaze and the viewer – is more intense. The nudes he photographed, however, were often his wife or daughter, and many of his best known images were actually taken on outings near his home. This gives an uncanny sense of ease to otherwise unfamiliar compositions. In Barbara Through Window, 1956, Bullock shoots from inside a wooden shack, light seeping into the dark interior through an open window that frames the sunlit, naked back of a young girl (actually the photographer’s daughter and long time collaborator). The lack of surface manipulation almost acts as a ruse, with formal detail distracting one’s attention from the more abstract questions which follow; questions of interior/exterior space, windows within frames, the photographer inside versus the nude/subject outside… Such is the subtle yet palpable tension in these photographs – images which are very much personal interventions rather than observed scenes.

The chronological arrangement of the photographs also traces a subtle development in Bullock’s work. Simply put, we see a closer proximity between lens and subject: his 1950s nudes in the forest become more tightly composed portraits during the 1960s. In the photographs selected from the early 1970s, however, the camera has moved even closer to the subject: details of wood-grain and rock fill the frame, achieving a well-considered abstraction – one that also seems related to his series of complex abstract colour photographs of the early 1960s, which is not part of the current exhibition.

Wynn Bullock was a contemporary of the likes of Imogen Cunningham, Minor White, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, not to mention other hugely influential names both American and international. In a relatively short time he achieved recognition from his peers, received photographic accolades, and held numerous solo exhibitions. At the end of the 1950s he achieved world-wide recognition when two of his images were selected for the epoch-making Family of Man exhibition, initiated by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Bullock’s approach was to try and reveal something about a world we often take for granted as seen and therefore known. The current exhibition readily evidences the conceptual possibilities of what might otherwise be dismissed as ‘traditional’ (read boring) fine-art photography.