Lillian Bassman

Paris Gala Night, Barbara Mullen in Dress by Patou, Paris, Harper's Bazaar

1949

Clarence Sinclair Bull was one of the great masters of the Hollywood portrait. As head of the stills department at MGM for over thirty years, he helped to pioneer the art and craft o...

Signed in pencil on mount Gelatin Silver Print Image 3 3/8 x 4 3/8", Mount 10x10, Matted 16x20

Clarence Sinclair Bull was one of the great masters of the Hollywood portrait. As head of the stills department at MGM for over thirty years, he helped to pioneer the art and craft o...

Wynn Bullock (1902 – 1975) was born in Chicago and raised in South Pasadena, California. His early career was as a singer, and following high school he moved to New York where he performed in the chorus of Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revue and later with the show’s Road Company. During the mid-1920s, while performing in Europe, he became fascinated with artworks by Cezanne, Man Ray, and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. Bullock once wrote, “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.” Bullock bought a simple box camera and launched into amateur picture making. In 1938 Bullock enrolled at the Los Angeles Art Center School. Three years later, his work was showcased in one of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's early solo photography exhibitions. During the 1940s, he conducted pioneering research to control the effect of solarization (a darkroom process for altering an image) and was awarded patents in the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain for a “Photographic Process for Producing Line Image.” Bullock was deeply inspired by fellow photographer Edward Weston, who he met in 1948, and Weston’s work motivated him to investigate straight photography. Throughout the 1950s, Bullock clarified his unique point of view, establishing a deep, direct connection with nature. A lifelong learner, he also read widely in the areas of physics, general semantics, philosophy, psychology, Eastern religion, and art. Bullock came into the public spotlight when Museum of Modern Art curator Edward Steichen chose two of his photographs for the 1955 Family of Man exhibition. When the exhibition was shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., his photograph Let There Be Light, was voted most popular. The second, Child in Forest, became one of the exhibition’s most memorable images. By the end of that decade, his work was widely exhibited and published worldwide and in 1957, he was honored with a medal from the Salon of International Photography. During the early 1960s, Bullock departed from the black-and-white imagery for which he was known and produced a major body of work, Color Light Abstractions, which expressed his belief that light is a great force at the heart of all being. Further image-making innovation included alternative approaches including extended time exposures, photograms, and negative printing. During the 1960s and 1970s Bullock expanded his influence through other roles. In 1968, he became a trustee and chairman of the exhibition committee during formative years at Friends of Photography in Carmel, California. He taught advanced photography courses at Chicago’s Institute of Design during Aaron Siskind’s sabbatical and at San Francisco State College at John Gutmann’s invitation. In the last decades of his life, he lectured widely, participated in many photographic seminars and symposia, and was a guest instructor for the Ansel Adams Yosemite...

Warren Beatty (b.1937) dropped out of Northwestern University to study acting with Stella Adler. He made his film debut in Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass...

Anthony Perkins was the son of the distinguished Broadway actor Osgood Perkins. He won an Academy Award nomination in just his second film, Friendly Persuasion (1956). In 1960, he appeared as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Psycho, and from then on, Perkins was strongly identified with that one role. When photographed by Jack Robinson on May 21, 1968, Perkins had just made Pretty Poison playing a mentally disturbed man opposite Tuesday Weld. He was married to the photographer Berry Berenson...

Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, born in Parma and the son of poets, was himself a published poet at the age of eighteen. He moved into films at twenty as an assistant director to Pier Paolo Pasolini, himself a poet turned filmmaker. When Jack Robinson photographed the twenty-eight year old Bertolucci on April 12, 1969, he had not yet started filming on The Conformist (1970) featuring the actors Jean-Louis Trintignant and Dominique Sanda. In Vogue, Bertolucci is described as “a shy man who moves the way he speaks and smiles, gently but cautiously, with sleepy brown eyes on the lookout for the worst”. As a filmmaker, he would achieve notoriety for Last Tango in Paris...

The French director Claude Chabrol was one of the Cahiers du Cinéma critics who became filmmakers. Chabrol’s film Le Beau Serge (1958) is considered to be the first film of the Frenc...