The Enchanted Landscape

Photographs 1940-1975

de Wynn Bullock, Raphael Shevelev, Ursula K. Le Guin

Through a long career of artistic distinction, Wynn Bullock produced a visionary body of work that can best be described as transcendent. In images of haunting beauty he explored the ineffability of time and space, the mystery moving beneath the static surface of reality, and the contradictory and compelling nature of existence itself. ***The Enchanted Landscape***, a definitive retrospective monograph of his photographs, confirms Wynn Bullock as one of this century's preeminent photographers. To Bullock, light was the first principle of the universe as well as of his camera. Through a fusion of photography with philosophy, science, physics, and aesthetics, he believed that the shapes of things and the different aspects of reality that shaped them could be revealed. His luminous images of children and female nudes and of primeval landscapes suggest the phantasms of a cosmos dreaming. His black-and-white abstractions rise above the strictures of line and shadow to approach the realm of pure energy. All depict the immanent relationship between the inner world of ideas and the outer world of events. Bullock's portraits of such friends as Robinson Jeffers, Henry Miller, and Edward Weston reflect his interaction with'some of the artists and thinkers of this century. In addition to ninety of Bullock's best known as well as rarely seen photographs, this volume includes excerpts from private papers in which the photographer expounds his mature views on art, nature, and human existence. With a poem by Ursula Le Guin, inspired by one of Bullock's most indelible images of a child in a forest, and a thoughtful biographical essay, ***The Enchanted Landscape*** celebrates the incandescent brilliance of a true American sage.