John Bulmer Exhibition

White Cloth Gallery to exhibit photographs from The North & Wind of Change

by acclaimed photographer John Bulmer
25th September – 12th November

White Cloth Gallery are delighted to exhibit around 20 framed colour and black & white photographs from The North and Wind of Change. All of the images have been scanned and cleaned by Bulmer and some scanned from prints when that’s all that remained. The exhibition will provide the centrepiece for White Cloth Gallery’s winter events programme including an evening celebration of photography on November 6th 2014 including a book signing by Bulmer.

John Bulmer was one of the first photographers to adapt to the sudden change towards using colour photography for editorial photojournalism and one of the first to be employed by the Sunday Times Magazine when it launched in 1962. The professional relationship secured him a 60 page a year contract and had him travel to around a 100 different countries in over a decade on their behalf.

Published in 2012 by the Liverpool based, The Bluecoat Press, The North quickly sold out (a 2nd edition has been published). The book put Bulmer firmly back on the photographic map. The north of England was part of the map this Herefordshire born black sheep hadn’t witnessed before when he first headed to the Lancashire town of Nelson. It’s the first town the viewer visits in the book, a town Bulmer thought as “exotic as darkest Africa”. Around 78 photographs in the 224 page book are in colour and 47 of those were shot in Manchester on commission for German Geo magazine who wanted him to capture the ‘swinging Manchester’ of 1976. Bulmer didn’t capture swinging Manchester, he captured empty canals and isolated pubs; cluttered corner shops; terraced houses being demolished and ravaged faces pulled taut against the elements by too tight head scarfs.

The photographs in Bulmer’s Wind of Change book (due to published by The Bluecoat Press October 2014) are other worldly and of another time; wide grinned Cubans smoke long fat cigars; there are half-naked Romanians who welcomed him to photograph their picnic and completely naked Germans in Romania who flung mud at his lens; there’s a shot from a bathroom in North Korea away from his watchful minder and mindful shots in China where he spent five days photographing unrestricted after defecting there when he missed a connecting flight in Moscow en route to North Korea. Figures stare out from across the landscape of Ethiopia, his fondest country to photograph from all of his travels and one where he had to run for a mile alongside a carriage in which Queen Elizabeth II sat, head cocked, flashing her pearly whites at Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie. Only when the crowds had fallen back did it allow Bulmer the opportunity to shoot a clean frame; all this exertion achieved while carrying four cameras, usually two Nikon’s and two Leica’s loaded with a mix of colour transparency and black and white film.

The North & Wind of Change

by John Bulmer