WILLIAM HELBURN BIOGRAPHY

For more than two decades William Helburn’s playful, sexy images were everywhere.  A contemporary of Avedon, Penn, Bassman and Horst, Helburn strove to create startling images that would spring off the page, often juxtaposing the sublime with the absurd. “Shock value was a term that was used,” says Helburn “And I meant to shock people as much as I could.”

Starting in 1949, Helburn photographed style for Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Life and Town & Country – and brought style to ads for Coca-Cola, General Motors, Buick, Revlon and Supima, working with Doyle Dane Bernbach and New York’s other ground-breaking agencies.  A “first-call” photographer at the heart of advertising’s creative revolution, Helburn brought a fashion photographer’s sensibility to everything he caught in his lens.

“I think fashion photography is, singularly, the most creative form of photography there is,” said Helburn of his art. “The fashion photographer always has so much of his inner self, contributing. His taste. His inner being … I didn’t think of myself as other than that.”

William “Bill” Helburn was born in New York City in 1924. After serving in the Pacific in World War II, Helburn was inspired to become a fashion photographer after then-partner Ted Croner encountered model Lisa Fonssagrives posing naked in the snow, in a test shoot for her husband Fernand.  Both Croner and Helburn would go on to study with Harper’s Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch at his Design Laboratory; Helburn’s work lead to a 10-page assignment for Bazaar that helped launch his career.  Helburn would go on to publish thousands of images and win dozens of awards for his fashion and advertising photography. William Helburn’s first book, published in 2014, is “William Helburn – Seventh and Madison”.   His photography has been shown in galleries and art shows around the world. William Helburn died November 3, 2020, in Connecticut. He was 96

For more information, contact:

Bob Lilly, Lilly Global Media

718-928-5899

bob@lillyglobalmedia.com

www.williamhelburn.com

contact:

Leslie Smolan – leslie@rodneysmith.com 

Patricia Barrett – patricia@rodneysmith.com

www.rodneysmith.com 

EDNA BULLOCK

Archive Contact: Barbara Bullock-Wilson (bbw@wynnbullockphotography.com)

Edna Bullock (1915-1997) was born and raised in the small rural community of Hollister, California.  She was a girl of high energy, good at a wide variety of sports, but without a sharp competitive edge.  Her first love was dance.  Although she had dreams of becoming a professional dancer, she was persuaded by her family not to pursue the life of a performer.  Her passion for dance never left her, however, and she found ways to manifest it throughout her life.

After college, Edna taught physical education at Fresno High School until her marriage in 1943 to former concert singer and budding photographer Wynn Bullock.  She devoted the next 15 years of her life to being a full-time housewife and mother, raising two daughters, Barbara and Lynne, along with stepdaughter, Mimi.  She then resumed her teaching career, first in P.E. and dance and then in home economics.  In 1974, she retired from teaching to care for her beloved husband, who died of cancer in November 1975.

Edna began her own career in photography in 1976, the year she turned 61.  As she explained, “I had inherited a darkroom, camera equipment, and supplies.  For more than 30 years, I had been immersed in the world of photography.  My own needs to be artistically creative were strong, so I decided to enroll in beginning photography at Monterey Peninsula College and see what I could do.”  She tackled her new venture with typical zeal and, in an amazingly short time, friends such as Ansel Adams, Morley Baer, and Ruth Bernhard witnessed her evolution from student to workshop assistant to fellow teacher and exhibitor.

An exceptionally prolific artist for two decades, Edna produced a wide variety of black and white imagery, including an extensive series on flea markets.  She is probably best known for her photographs of nudes, many of which can be found in a book released on her 80^th birthday titled simply Edna’s Nudes (Capra Press, 1995).  Reflecting her character, her work is intuitive, direct, zesty, graceful (she saw with a dancer’s eye), and touched with humor.

What turned out to be her final exhibition project was titled Edna’s Portraits, an interesting collection of photographs that spanned the entire range of her artistry and gave a fresh glimpse into what portraiture can be.  In her Artist’s Statement, she wrote, “I’m not a deep thinker like Wynn was, but like it was for Wynn, photography has become the best way I have to experience and know things.  When I’m out with a camera, I feel most alive…. I see and understand things I’m not ordinarily aware of.  Mind you, this doesn’t happen every time I photograph…but the magic that I’m talking about makes me want to photograph until I die.”

During her relatively short photographic career, Edna’s images were displayed in over 100 individual and group exhibitions throughout the U.S. and abroad, reproduced in numerous publications, and included in the permanent collections of such institutions as Bibliotheque Nationale, Kyoto’s National Museum of Modern Art, Monterey Museum of Art, University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, and University of California, Santa Cruz.

As the wife of renowned photographer Wynn Bullock, Edna was an important part of her husband’s story for 32 years.  As a woman who began a new career at age 61, she created an inspiring story totally her own.

WYNN BULLOCK

Archive Contact: Barbara Bullock-Wilson (bbw@wynnbullockphotography.com)

http://www.wynnbullockphotography.com/

Wynn Bullock (1902-1975) was born in Chicago and raised in South Pasadena, California.  His boyhood passions were athletics and singing.  The latter became his first career, and it was not until he was giving concerts in Europe in the mid-1920s that he became intrigued with the visual arts.  He bought himself a simple camera and began taking pictures.  Photography remained a hobby, however, until 1938 when he enrolled in the Los Angeles Art Center School.  There he concentrated his efforts in experimental imagery.  Three years later, his work was showcased in one of the early solo photography exhibitions at the L.A. County Museum of Art.

Shortly after World War II, Wynn moved his family to the Monterey Peninsula where he had obtained the photographic concession at Fort Ord.  Although Wynn earned a good living as a commercial photographer, it was in his personal work that he found his greatest fulfillment.

A major turning point in Wynn’s life as an artist occurred in 1948 when he met Edward Weston and was inspired to pursue new avenues of photographic exploration and expression.  Throughout the decade of the 50s, Wynn devoted himself to establishing deep, direct connections with nature in and around the Central Coast of California.  A lifelong learner, he also read widely in the areas of theoretical physics, General Semantics, philosophy, psychology, eastern spirituality, and art.  Studying the work of such people as Albert Einstein, Lao Tzu, and Paul Klee, he kept evolving his own dynamic system of principles and concepts that both reflected and nurtured his creative journey.  In the mid-1950s, two of his photographs were included in the famous Family of Man exhibition and his reputation as a master photographer spread worldwide.

Between 1959 and 1965, Wynn departed from black and white imagery and produced a body of work he referred to as “color light abstractions.”  For him, these photographs represented an in-depth exploration of the phenomenon of light, manifesting his belief that light is a great force at the heart of all being, “perhaps,” as he said, “the most profound truth in the universe.”

By the mid-60s, Wynn was ready to explore the mysteries of light and life from new perspectives.  Developing the means to visually manifest the dynamic qualities of time through long time exposures and multiple images became a key aspect of his work.  This was followed by a relatively brief period of imagery similar in feeling and power to the quiet essence of Haiku poetry.

At the end of the 1960s, Wynn embarked on what was to become the last leg of his creative journey.  Although he included upside-down and negative printing in his repertoire of techniques, it was not their unusual effects that interested him.  What was important was how they served to symbolize new ways of relating to and knowing the world.  Many of his photographs from this period reveal light emanating from within the heart of things, life glowing and pulsing with energy and vitality.  Other photographs are of natural forms that depict or suggest universal human qualities, humanity “deeply embedded in” and re-united with nature.

Shortly before his death in 1975, Wynn became one of the five founding artists whose archives established the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography.  His work is also featured in the permanent collections of over one hundred other institutions throughout the world as well as in three films and numerous publications.   More detailed information may be found at www.wynnbullockphotography.com.