Wynn Bullock was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1902. Bullock was originally trained to become a vocalist in New York City and toured with Irving Berlin's Music Box Revue. While in Europe, he came across artists such as Cezanne, Man Ray, and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, and subsequently took a different creative path. Bullock said: “my first ambition was to become a concert singer…. but interpreting others’ creative work did not satisfy my own creative impulses and so I turned to photography.”
In 1938, Wynn attended the Los Angeles Art Center School and only three years later his work was shown at LACMA in a solo exhibition. He began experimenting with the darkroom process of solarization, where some areas of the photograph are exposed to light, creating interesting ranges in contrast. Much of Bullock's work was inspired by Edward Weston; they shared a similar aesthetic of isolated macro shots of seemingly ordinary objects, conveying a much deeper, mathematical beauty of nature.
Bullock's photographs "Let There Be Light" and "Child in Forest" gained prominent attention when they were picked by Edward Steichen to show in the 1955 Family of Man exhibition at MoMA and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.. Both pictures stood out to audiences and by the end of the decade, Bullock was published worldwide and honored with a medal from the Salon of International Photography in 1957.
In the 1960s, Bullock took a creative turn and experimented with colorful abstractions, a stark divergence from his highly contrasted black and white photography. Later in the decade and into the 70s, Bullock expanded his role into other fields. He became a trustee and chairman of the exhibition committee at Friends of Photography in Carmel, California. He also taught advanced photography courses at the Chicago Institute of Design, as well as a guest instructor at Ansel Adam's Yosemite workshop.
Wynn Bullock died at the age of 73 in November 1975.