Wynn Bullock (1902-1975) was born on April 18, 1902, in Chicago, Illinois. After graduating from college, Bullock worked as a professional singer in New York and toured Europe. In 1938 he moved to Los Angeles and entered law school, which he soon dropped out to pursue photography. Upon entering the School of Fine Arts, Bullock began to take an active interest in photographic processes such as solarization and bas-relief techniques. He soon took on various commercial photographic orders.
After serving in the army, Bullock continues to explore the possibilities of photography, develops a unique way to control the solarization process, and even patents his discovery. After meeting Edward Weston in 1948, Bullock became interested in «straight» photography. Throughout the 1950s, he explored the natural world using the technology he found. His exhibitions are held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Crocor en Gallery in Washington. In the 1960s, Bullock mastered new experiments with colour and created a series of abstract colour images, after which he returned to black and white experimental photography, which he continued to practice until the end of his life.
Ball Oka’s photographs gained early recognition, with his first solo exhibition opening in 1941 at the Los Angeles Museum of Fine Arts. Then his later works were exhibited at such institutions as the National Library of Paris, the Royal Photographic Society in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute in Chicago and many others. Bullock’s archives became the basis for the collection of the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, which owns one of the most significant photographic collections in the world. Despite his recognition during his lifetime, the real scale and magnitude of Bullock’s legacy were only appreciated in 2014, when the High Museum of Art in Atlanta opened his first retrospective exhibition in forty years. Bullock’s works are in more than 90 major museum institutions around the world.
