John Bulmer interview
An interview with photographer John Bulmer
Around this time last year, I travelled to Herefordshire to meet photographer John Bulmer to speak about his work and practice at his prime time in the 1960’s. Considered a pioneer of colour photography at the time, John, now in his 70’s spoke to me of his work and granted me some very important advice, alongside a very expensive cup of tea in one of Herefords most exquisite hotels. Here’s what he had to say.
Sophie Pitchford:
I would consider the thing I related the most to your work was the idea of photographing class. Sometimes this subject can become quite invasive and obtrusive, how did you deal with this when working on ‘The North?’
John Bulmer:
It’s strange because I believed in what I call decisive moment photography, where you’re not posing people, you just grab people in the street and wherever. I don’t ask them first because I think as soon as you ask somebody they start putting on a face and you’re just going to get a completely different side of them. If they do question it you can just always ask afterwards if you can use their picture. It’s like the picture on the cover of 'The North'.
You see the cover, If I’d stopped them and asked them if I could take that photograph they would have gorped at the camera and smiled and it would have completely destroy all the naturalness of it to me. I was lucky because in that period in the 1960’s, magazines were happy to have what I call ‘photo journalism’, or you can also call it ‘decisive moment photography’, where you actually grab things as they happen. Where as if you look at a similar magazine now, 95% of the photographs are actually formally staged, and you get something completely different. If you go through this book, there are a few pictures where I may have asked people, but it’s pretty rare, and as far as the people are concerned, to me people are people regardless where they come from, If I go and photograph a bunch of coal miners or something like that I don’t find them essentially any different to a bunch of toffs on a shooting parlour, they’re all just people. More recently I’ve been doing films in places like New Guinea with tribes who live in the rainforest, whom I lived with for a month, I would ask them questions and interview them in exactly the same way you might do with for example someone from the upper classes or a Politician or something. People are all individuals, they all have characteristics and I always felt strongly as a photographer that I wanted to be completely classless; I wanted to be an observer, completely neutral. Funnily enough my very fist job working for the daily express as a news photographer, I’d always have to wear a suit because you never knew when you turned up whether you were going to be sent to interview some deb of the year to William Hickey to a gangsters funeral or perhaps a Royal Wedding, you just never knew where you were going to end up. You had to be able to learn the ability of drifting from one group of people to another. Like I said, you had to be completely classless. And when I went to the North of England I just reacted to what I saw, people even now look at my pictures and say ‘ well you were a young middle class boy from the South, what did they feel about you, and you them?’ And I just reply ‘They are just people, they have an interesting lifestyle and I wanted to record it’ It wasn’t about class, they ask ‘Why did you take that particular picture, what’s so special about that?’ and my reaction would be that it just looked like a good picture at the time, it just looked interesting.
SP:
Did you feel you found more beauty within the bleakness of the North than in the South?
JB:
Well, I think one of the things I’ve always liked is photographing things that are new and exciting. Wondering around the cobbled streets on one of my first trips to the North, to me was extremely exciting, in the same way going to Africa would be. It was different and exciting, I wanted to grab the images whilst they were still fresh and new, I didn’t want to hang around enough for them to become mundane and ordinary.
SP:
That’s an interesting comparison, as I suppose you’re right; Britain differs an awful lot from top to bottom.
JB:
Yes it was new and it was exciting, other people like to photograph where they live but that just wasn’t for me, I liked the thought of photographing something new.
SP:
I am currently focusing on some quite broad issues within my work, I just wondered how you took a subject as broad as the North, narrowed it down yet still kept it’s context.
JB:
You have to perhaps focus enough to get something of a perhaps storyline. This book on the North is actually made up of 8 different chapters, each of them was one assignment, I would walk around the street and photograph anything I wanted, but it still had a degree of narrative, that it’s about a different place and a different point of view. It’s hard really to keep things narrow enough to give you a story, yet not so narrow that it becomes boring.
SP:
How do you find the courage to photograph people you do not know?
JB:
It’s hard to have the courage to just pick a camera up and point it in someone’s face, but for me, it was always easier with an assignment., if you had an assignment from a magazine it get’s you out of bed in the morning. When you’re at Art College you have to make your own assignments, you have to get it in to your head that it’s important enough to have the courage to do it.
I also think it’s easier to focus on one group of people or one thing, the sort of obvious example that spring to mind in the North are the last of the Miners, you know, to me that would be an interesting story. Or even some of the real Ghettos in places like Bradford.
SP:
I’m still learning how to use my camera, do you have any advice on how I really get to grips with the whole thing?
JB:
What I would do is get your hands on a camera and really get used to it, and be able to do things consistently, then when things aren’t right you know how to fix them. Whereas if you change your cameras all the time, to me a camera needs to be a part of your body. Get to know your camera and also your project enough to work up on it, students tend to do a little bit of this and a little bit of that and it never quite comes together the one thing.
SP:
What is the best way to make an impact when focusing on a particular subject?
JB:
I think the key is to limit yourself to something that you can actually get a hold of, and If you can take 10 or 12 photos that are saying something about the same subject , it’s much more powerful than hundreds. If say for instant when you are going for a job if they can see you have actually developed an idea and moved along an idea. I know for instance when I was working for the Sunday Times I would often get the job of looking over students portfolios, and they used to come in with one picture of this and one picture of that, and the thing is, most people can get one good picture of something if they spend long enough on it, but what really separates the sheep from the goats is if you can go out and come back with 12 good pictures developing one theme. I think people find that much more powerful.
SP:
I enjoy applying different practices, so the idea of creating a series of photographs and analysing how they work and speak to each other really interests me, like how they would work in a book or a magazine or a website or something.
JB:
The good thing about you also being interested in design is that you will be able to make a living. However, you need to remember that unless you become a fine artist, it’s not about the doing but it’s the results that matter. So if you enjoy a particular process what you have to do is be able to control the results and get them the quickest.
SP:
I recently saw your ‘The North and the winds of change’ exhibition at the White Cloth Gallery, what was it that made you combine the two bodies of work into one exhibition?
JB:
They are the only projects that I have made books of, and I was actually trying to promote the winds of change and sell more copies of it, and they actually suggested because Leeds is in the North that I should have some photographs from the North, so I just took 20 pictures from each book.
SP:
There’s a specific image that caught my eye at the exhibition, ‘Redhead with pram, 1965, Liverpool’
JB:
This photograph is actually one of my favourite ones, It’s interesting because it has the graphic element of the colours and the mural, and it could almost be from Northern Ireland, even though it’s from Liverpool. But I was always looking for Graphic things and I saw all of this and I just kind of knew it needed something in the foreground, and I just hung around there, she wasn’t posed or anything like that, I waited for her to come and then just grabbed it. It was a mixture of anticipation and luck. You know, obviously one does have luck where people go, but you have to take that one chance and anticipate what things are going to be and grab them at that right moment. I absolutely know that if I posed her it wouldn’t have any of that same quality. Although she’s seen me, I didn’t have time to destroy the naturalness of it and that’s a strange thing isn’t it? All within a split second.
SP:
How did you manage to make such commercial work so personal?
JB:
The thing is, it is hard to make a living out of this photography now, people do but not very many. Sometimes people say ‘Oh you took ‘Sunday times’ kind of pictures’ and I say no I didn’t I took my own kind of pictures, because that’s what was in the Sunday times. But what happened actually was by the early 70’s the Sunday Times faced commercial pressures and started becoming what they call ‘Lifestyle’. Basically what it meant was that the editorial pictures became to look more like advertising. It became glamorous because it would sell magazines; it was all to do with money really. There was a new editor who came along and he called me into his office and said ‘right what we want is stories on crime, class living and fashion’ and I knew my days were numbered. However lots of photographers who worked for big agencies like Magnum became very commercial, they started doing sort of company reports for big business’s and things like that, or sort of commercial things for travel on hotels and such. I didn’t really want to do that, and that’s why I started doing films as well.
SP:
So you wanted to keep that artistic element of your photography even if it was commercial.
JB:
I’ve never been happy with doing one thing for art and one thing to make a living, I wanted them together.
Me:
Any last bits of advice?
JB:
I think the only thing I can say is really just try to focus yourself on every picture, throw out the extraneous stuff and make it simpler and stronger. The best pictures are the simplest ones in a way, and the best stories are the simplest ones. A lot of young photographers are all trying to do too much at once, It’s like making an abstract painting, it has to be less and less. The world is too cluttered, physically, visually, and emotionally.
Comments