John Bulmer was a pioneer of colour photography in Britain and one of the defining photojournalists of the 1960s and 70s. Beginning his career working in black and white, he became recognised for adapting seamlessly to colour following the launch of The Sunday Times Colour Magazine in 1962, becoming one of its key contributors and helping establish colour reportage as a serious documentary form.

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Beginning as a photographer in Herefordshire and later at Cambridge, where he co-founded the picture magazine Image, Bulmer moved to London to work for the Daily Express before producing influential stories for publications including Town, The Observer and Geo. His commissions took him across a rapidly changing world as colonial powers withdrew and political tensions reshaped Africa, South America and South-East Asia. Alongside these international assignments, Bulmer became known for photographing industrial and provincial Britain with the same attention and intensity, documenting places such as The Black Country, Nelson and The North. His photographs often explored contrasts of wealth and poverty, movement and stillness, and the social landscapes created by political and economic change.

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Bulmer’s work is marked by an instinct for timing and an ability to distil complex places into immediate, memorable images. Working at a time when photographers often waited weeks or months to discover whether they had captured what they imagined, his photographs show a confidence in observation and composition that made colour feel purposeful rather than decorative. In the early 1970s he moved into documentary filmmaking for the BBC, Nat Geo and Discovery Channel before returning to Herefordshire to catalogue and exhibit his extensive archive of still photographs, which continue to gain recognition through exhibitions internationally.