By the very act of taking a photograph, you freeze a moment in time. But think about how artificial an act that is. Human beings aren't "frozen in time" kinds of creatures. Life is continuous. We're constantly thinking of a past, present and future.
Then there's the whole idea of "space." A photograph is by its very nature flat, capturing in two dimensions what we see in three. If we were flat, too, the two-dimensionality of an image would seem wondrous and all-encompassing. As it is, there's always a part of us that is aware of the limitations of the medium -- a little, nagging buzz in our brain that keeps us on the outside looking in.
Wynn Bullock, a master photographer of the 20th Century who died in 1975, mused about such things all the time. He was so fascinated that he spent a great deal of time studying Einstein and other physicists who wrote about quantum mechanics and the space-time continuum. For the length of his long and storied career, Bullock grappled with these issues in a way that breathed intensity and significance into his works. He pondered how as an artist he could most effectively depict the passage of time and a feeling of space.
When you look at "Color Light Abstractions," the exhibition of Bullock images at Spectrum Art Gallery, the complexity -- and wonder -- of these issues come to light, so to speak. The collection of 29 large color prints show a side of Bullock that isn't as well known as his famed black and white images. For years, these works, all shot on color slide film, mostly had to languish in the dark because it wasn't possible to faithfully reproduce them as prints. But thanks to advances in digital imaging, it's now possible to dive into Bullock's often weird, wonderful perception of the world in a gallery setting.
"He was a visual explorer," says Barbara Bullock-Wilson, one of his two surviving daughters. "He used photography to probe the universe. In the process, he expanded the edges of the photographic medium itself."
Spectrum, a thriving photography cooperative gallery, is the third venue in the country to showcase the color Bullock prints. (The exhibition opened at the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel and then showed at Tucson's Center for Creative Photography.)
Bullock-Wilson and her sister, Lynn Harrington-Bullock, were both in attendance at Spectrum for the opening of the exhibition and were featured at a discussion and film screening.
Bullock and his wife, Edna, met in Fresno in World War II, which in part explains why Spectrum is a favorite gallery of the Bullock family. Edna Bullock, was working as a physical education teacher at Fresno High School -- her first job out of college -- when she got set up by the owner of the boarding house in which she lived on a blind date. That's how she met Bullock, who was stationed at Fresno's Hammer Field.
For their first date he took her to a boxing match, Bullock-Wilson told the Spectrum audience with a laugh, which almost ended the romance right there. But a connection was made, and they eventually settled in the Carmel area.
Over the years, Bullock built a reputation as a thinking photographer. (His friend Ansel Adams once told him: "Wynn, just shut up and take photographs," his daughter says.) Two of his black and white works were selected for a landmark show titled "The Family of Man" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, including a 1951 shot of a pale little girl laying face down in the rich, dark, needled earth of a Northern California redwood grove titled Child in Forest. (Bullock-Wilson is that little girl.)
The works in the Spectrum show came from an interlude in Bullock's career in which he experimented with an apparatus he invented that held layers of glass together. He inserted between those layers stained glass shards, patterned glass, crumpled pieces of cellophane, water droplets, honey and anything else he could think that would reflect and refract light.
He used Kodachrome slide film to capture the abstract images. Bullock-Wilson remembers family "slide parties" when he'd project his newly developed slides and they'd marvel at the effects he achieved.
The problem at the time, however, was that Bullock could only project the images in a slideshow setting -- not a very practical way to show art.
"Dad died before color printing technology became readily available," Bullock-Wilson says. "We knew that he wanted us someday to make this work available."
That day has finally come with the advent of high-resolution scanning and digital printing. A longtime family friend and color-lab professional, John Hall, was instrumental in getting the project started several years ago.
The effect is a seething, whip-saw effect of vibrant colors, strange shapes, scattered prisms and almost bottomless depth. In some ways, the images seem to predate the psychedelic digital effects and trippy, space-age vibe that you can get from digital software these days -- think PhotoShop on acid -- but without the bluntness.
Bullock didn't intend for the images to be anything but purely abstract musings on light and color. But it's only human to see patterns. Is that a sunset? A fiery volcano? A pier on a beach? A man singing in a smoky nightclub?
"I definitely see things," says Spectrum president Steve Dzerigian. "Not always, but usually. That, for me, is an added viewing treat. The works sort of morph into a relationship with me as a viewer."
And, of course, there's a sense in these works of the passage of time -- of discrete moments built upon each other, of slivers of the present piled up in bursts of light and color. There's a sense also of space -- of a depth of field and volume, thanks to all those layers of glass, that make you feel as if you could fall into the images.
I like to think that Wynn Bullock, who spent so much of his career trying to capture the dimensions of our lives, would be happy if we did just that.
The columnist can be reached at dmunro@fresnobee.com or (559) 441-6373
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