"The thing about colour is, photography is a form of abstraction in a way - you reduce everything to something that's simple enough to give you an emotional kick.”
John Bulmer

“As a schoolboy I was fascinated by mechanical things like Meccano, toy trains, etc, and then someone gave me a Box Brownie camera. To start with I was fascinated by the mechanics; I developed my pics and built an enlarger out of Meccano and old saucepans. Then I discovered the magic of the image and I was hooked.” John Bulmer

British photographer John Bulmer achieved tremendous acclaim for his pioneering colour photojournalism and his reportage of the North of England.

Bulmer's commercial success as a photographer is inevitably tied to the The Sunday Times Magazine to which he was one of the most prolific and creative contributors. The weekly magazine was launched in 1962 as the first colour supplement to accompany a national newspaper. Despite many of Bulmer’s assignments were abroad, his reputation was cemented above all as a humanistic recorder of the North of England. The collapse of the traditional industries of the Industrial Revolution was affecting populations throughout the region and John Bulmer, himself born in the North, shared a palpable empathy with these communities. In 1965 The Sunday Times Magazine published a colour-reportage about the North; images of cobbles and chimneys, of women and washing, of miners like the ones in Waldridge, spreading over no less than 14 pages. Many of Bulmer's photographs were taken in subdued light or after rain, which allowed for a certain degree of gloom but also created a soft, almost pastel effect that is so characteristic of his brilliant work.