Wynn Bullock: Romantic Photography Sunday April 2, 2006
My introduction to Romanticism was with Wordsworth and others, during my A Level English. I particularly enjoyed Yeats, who I regarded for many years as my favourite poet. At university I wanted to study the Romantics but it was a tough decision, made in favour of Dickens, Shakespeare and the Tragic Play. I did however spend a little time reading about the tradition, for my own interest. Wynn Bullock is a quintessentially Romantic photographer, I’ve only recently paid attention to. He said:
One of the many ways to emphasise both space and time is to develop your sense of opposites. If you skilfully photograph an older object together with a younger one, the qualities of each are enhanced by their contrasting characters. As soon as I became aware of this, I became aware of the difference between seeing and perceiving. Seeing is an automatic process, perceiving is a mental, more complex process. Out of perceiving begins growth (Wynn Bullock: The Enchanted Landscape 1993).
My own ‘romanticism’ largely concerns my mountain and Lake District photography. I’m aware that it’s not a fashionable interest, because it fits into an old-school ethos dating back to pre-postmodernism, or even Victorian times. It fits into a genre associated with Ansel Adams, and contemporary photographers like Charlie Waite and Joe Cornish. I suppose I feel slightly embattled about that, like I’m wearing flared jeans and a paisley shirt, when everyone else is wearing combat trousers and…whatever; I don’t actually know – although my position is sophisticated rather than naive, and includes a considered criticism of fashionable ideas. A mountain panorama can be deconstructed as ‘mere’ Romanticism, or the transcendentalism that goes back to Adams, but that in itself is not any great authority. Deconstruction can itself be deconstructed, by exemplifying intellectual attitudes that are not so much absolute and knowing, as fashionable and contingent.
Despite my cynicism in relation to much contemporary theory, I acknowledge it does encourage a critical and thinking process that has some value. But you can go further than these established critical methods – you can deconstruct deconstruction, and consider what it is saying in terms of psychology, human capacity, and what is a kind of intellectual fashion, that doesn’t necessarily have an enduring or in-depth validity. So Kant for example, in his book Critique of Human Understanding, outlines a conceptual strategy that locates cognitive and intellectual tendency as an inherently limited human tool – his analysis is reflexive, and self-reflective, questioning himself in a way that contemporary academic trends often don’t. Bullock is quite interesting, by distinguishing between automatic seeing and perceiving. The former would conventionally be associated with naive or superseded modernism, and the latter with knowing postmodernism where we’ve opened up the box of received understanding and grand narratives, and revealed the politics and relativity of the more innocent era. But it’s quite possible the ‘perceiving’ Bullock refers to was, and still is, a valid component of Romanticism: that there are dimensions of human capacity that are intuitive and trans-intellectual, not ideas that can be pinned down like dead butterfiles in a collectors postmodernist net. As Lakoff and Johnson say in Metaphors We Live By:
Truth is relative to understanding, which means that there is no absolute standpoint from which to obtain absolute objective truths about the world. This does not mean that there are no truths; it means only that the truth is relative to our conceptual system, which is grounded in, and constantly tested by, our experiences and those of other members of our culture in our daily interactions with other people and with our physical and cultural environments (1980: 193).
Dear James Lomax,
I am currently studying Wynn Bullock for my A2 Photgraphy Personnel Investigation. I have found your eassay throughly infromative and useful. I was wondering whether you could give me a furhter insight into the reasoning behind Bullock’s views of the human figure within nature?
Kind Regards,
Brad Vanstone
— Brad Vanstone · Sep 16, 05:02 PM · §
Hi Brad, not researched Bullock in any depth and I’m not sure he wrote much or explained his views so I can’t comment on that specifically. As I recall, The Enchanted Landscape is mostly a photo book with short commentary.
I suggest two ways of understanding Bullock though, both of which could be pursued quite easily.
First, locate him in the genre of Romanticism and on that basis you will find lots of material to research.
Secondly, locate him in the prevailing culture of his time: for example, the Victorian era was well known for certain characteristics like the rise of a new Darwinianism and faith in Science, that undermined the religious ethos. Born in 1902, Bullock was just on the cusp of that era though as an American that makes his situation different from post Victorian, Dickensian Britain. Apparently he was inspired by Cézanne, Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, so there’s a bit of surrealism in there.
You might also want to consider other kinds of art where you see the human figure in nature and there’s lots of that about. Check out the Pre Raphaelites, and maybe images of Ophelia, taken from Shakespeare. Its quite common to see the female figure linked with a mythos of Nature, as with Ophelia drowning, and Bullock did this but also with children as in the images above. Wordsworth said ‘the child is father to the man’, I vaguely recall, meaning the innocence of childhood is where the personality gets stamped, sculpted, and formed with subsequent lifelong repercussions.
Looking at these two images again, two and a half years after I wrote this, what I also see is a dream-like quality that I felt, then, but didn’t articulate. It would be interesting to trace this to contemporary work in photographers like Geoffrey Crewdson.
Not a definitive answer there, more a few explorative ideas. I think for me, what i like about Bullock/these two images is the dream-like quality and what it signifies in psychological terms.
— James Lomax · Sep 16, 08:30 PM · §
hellow~!
i’m student to korea national university of arts
a scenography becuse modeling crece keep abuot wynn bullock to me! plese your self~
— young-gil han · Sep 12, 05:35 PM · §