High to put modernist photographer Wynn Bullock in focus

"Wynn Bullock: Revelations" opens June 2014.

Bullock's black-and-white work is represented in Atlanta by Lumiere gallery, www.lumieregallery.net.

The High Museum of Art, where photography is the largest and fastest-growing collection, has announced that it will mount a major retrospective of the work of Wynn Bullock, considered one of the masters of mid-20th-century photography.

Opening in June 2014 and organized in collaboration with the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, “Wynn Bullock: Revelations” will be the first career-spanning exhibition of the California photographer’s work by a major museum in nearly four decades.

The exhibit will coincide with a gift to the High from Bullock’s estate of more than 100 vintage photographs, ensuring that the High will become the largest repository of the innovative modernist’s work in the eastern U.S.

High Museum photography curator Brett Abbott, who worked closely with the photographer’s estate as an associate curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles before joining the High in 2011, said the 110-work exhibit and gift are an opportunity to return Bullock’s “powerful work” to prominence and to engage a new generation.

Bullock received early recognition in 1941 when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art mounted his first solo exhibition. Edward Steichen's 1955 exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art, "The Family of Man," cemented his reputation nationally and internationally.

"Child in Forest" (1951) and "Let There Be Light" (1954), Bullock photos selected by Steichen for that landmark MOMA show, became iconic images of the modernist era. Both will be included in the High retrospective. Meanwhile, Bullock's "Old Typewriter" (1951) is on view in the current High exhibit "The Bunnen Collection."

Shortly after World War II, the Chicago-born artist settled in Monterey and shot extensively around the moody Monterey Peninsula and other natural spots in Northern California. He became close friends with California photographers Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, the latter of whom he initially imitated before developing his own vision.

Bullock’s changing approach was influenced by broad reading about physics, philosophy, psychology, Eastern religion, art and other topics. “The medium of photography can record not only what the eyes see, but that which the mind’s eye sees as well,” he once said.

The High exhibit will trace Bullock’s evolution starting with his early experimental work of the 1940s, through mysterious black-and-white imagery of the 1950s, color light abstractions of the 1960s, to his late metaphysical photographs of the 1970s.

Though he is represented in more than 90 museum collections around the world, his work has not remained on the radar to near the extent of his friends Adams and Weston.

Abbott cites several reasons, including that Bullock “was much more interested in making work than in promoting it.” Bullock also had a “strained” relationship with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, the influential mid-century curators and photography historians.

Another factor: Bullock died of cancer in 1975, at age 73, at a time when modernism “was being questioned within the museum-sphere by a new breed of artist-photographer,” Abbott said.

Taking the long view, the High curator considers Bullock’s body of work “pivotal” in the history of photography. Abbott believes the retrospective and accompanying catalog from the University of Texas Press will re-establish the photographer, and that the estate’s gift to the High will lead to future regional and international exhibits.

“It’s a remarkable story of generosity on the part of the Bullock estate,” Abbott said. “They are by no means a wealthy family, and this is truly a gift made with noble intentions.”