John Bulmer was born on the 28th of February 1938 in Herefordshire. When Bulmer was young he was interested in photography but mostly as a technology. Despite that, when he was a teenager he became a great admirer of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Bulmer went on to study engineering at Cambridge where his interest in photography began properly. After beginning this he went on to get his work published in lots of different magazines and newspapers such as Varsity magazine and the Daily Express. His ambition was photography journalism.

These are a selection of my favourite images by John Bulmer. These images show Bulmer both using colour and black and white. He began using colour after it was required for one of the magazines he took pictures for asked for it.  His images often displayed people from the working class such as miners or factory workers.

The image below is one of John Bulmers best images. It displays people in the North of England in their village hanging up clothes to dry.

Technical: This image makes use of natural lighting. This type of lighting is used because of the setting and to display the bright but dull looking weather of the area the image is taken. This image may have also taken the image at a time like this to make the area seem constantly cold and damp.

Visual: Bulmer has taken this photo at a time where the sky was bright and cloudy. This has created a contrast between the white background and the darker foreground. This makes the figures and the details in the image easily visible. This image also has form in it creating a 3D effect showing a long cobblestone road in the image. This creates an idea of community as all the buildings shown are close together and similar to each other.

Contextual: This image taken by Bulmer uses colour film. This was thought of as a difficult move for photographers at the time this image was taken. This is because colour may be harder to use than black and white for a lot of people. Bulmer is thought of as a pioneer of coloured photography because of his images, like this one.

Also, this image like a lot of Bulmer’s other work is used to show the true life of the people in the North of England. The image has been taken in a dull village and shows a mundane task to display the uninteresting lives of people in the working class in the North of England.

Conceptual: The idea of this image is that Bulmer wanted to capture the life and identity of people in the North of England. He has done this by capturing some people from the area with the old grey buildings and horrible weather to display the geographical identity of the area. This image also shows the identity of the community. This is also done through the long road with all the buildings close by each other, this along with the fact that there are two people of different age groups shows that people are close together with each other in the village.

Definition of Identity 

Who a person is, or the qualities of a person or group that make them different from others.

Definition of Gender Identity- Wiki

Gender identity is the personal sense of one’s own gender.  Gender identity can link to set gender at birth, or can be the complete opposite.  All societies have a set of gender categories. In most societies, there is a basic division between gender attributes assigned to males and females, a gender binary to which most people adhere and which includes expectations of masculinity and femininity in all aspects of sex and gender. biological sex, gender identity, and gender expression. Some people do not identify with some, or all, of the aspects of gender assigned to their biological sex.

Definition of Social Identity- Wiki

 Social identity is the portion of an individual’s self-concept derived from perceived membership in a relevant social group.

Definition of Political Identity- Wiki

 Political positions based on the interests and perspectives of social groups with which people identify.

Definition of Cultural Identity- Wiki

Cultural identity is the identity or feeling of belonging to a group. It is part of a person’s self-conception and self-perception and is related to nationality, ethnicity, religion, social class, generation, locality or any kind of social group that has its own distinct culture.

Definition of Geographical/ National Identity- Wiki

National identity is a person’s identity or sense of belonging to one state or to one nation. It is the sense of a nation as a cohesive whole, as represented by distinctive traditions, culture, language and politics.

   Definition of Lack of /Loss of Identity

Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson born 13th August 1960 is an African-American photographer who came most popular around the 1980s and 1990s with artwork such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal. Her work as been displayed in multiple exhibitions all around the world and is most famous for her photo text installations, photo collages and films. Simpson first came to prominence in the 1980s for her large-scale works that combined photography and text and defied traditional conceptions of sex, identity, race, culture, history, and memory. Lorna Simpson received her BFA  in Photography from the school of visual arts in new York then followed by  getting her MFA from the university of California. Lorna Simpson always looked into the idea of challenging the norm and what she believed that society expected. Going into depth about identity and exploring how people really feel about themselves and how one might want to portray themselves.

She started off taking photographs of things she saw around her- but soon realized  that she wanted to focus more directly to explore the ideas and issues she felt strongly about. so she began to take carefully posed images in her studio. to really branch out she began looking into the idea of added words or other images alongside the photographs she could express even more powerfully feelings and was then able to leave her images up for interpretation.

Some of Lorna Simpson’s work:

Lorna Simpson
Five Day Forecast 1991