Quote of the Week by Wynn Bullock

“In a photograph, if I am able to evoke not alone a feeling of the reality of the surface physical world but also a feeling of the reality of existence that lies mysteriously and invisibly beneath its surface, I feel I have succeeded. At their best, photographs as symbols not only serve to help illuminate some of the darkness of the unknown, they also serve to lessen the fears that too often accompany the journeys from the known to the unknown.” —Wynn Bullock (1902-1975)

Wynn Bullock was originally trained to become a  vocalist in New York City and toured with Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revue. While in Europe, he came across artists such as Cezanne, Man Ray, and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, and subsequently took a different creative path. In 1938, Wynn attended the Los Angeles Art Center School and only three years later his work was shown at LACMA in a solo exhibition. Much of Bullock’s work was inspired by Edward Weston. In 1955, Bullock’s photographs Let There Be Light and Child in Forest gained prominent attention when they were featured Family of Man exhibition at MoMA and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. By the end of the decade, Bullock was published worldwide and honoured with a medal from the Salon of International Photography in 1957. Along with Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Frederick Sommer, he became part of the founding group of photographers whose archives established the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in 1975. His works s are in the permanent collections of over 90 museums, educational institutions, and art centers, including Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, J. Paul Getty Museum, and Museum of Fine Arts.