Bulmer was born on 28 February 1938 in
Herefordshire, the grandson of the founder of the
Bulmer cider company. He started photography when young. Although his earliest interest in it was primarily as a technology (he even built his own
enlarger), he was a great admirer of
Henri Cartier-Bresson as a teenager. Bulmer studied engineering at Cambridge, where his interest in photography deepened. While still a student he had photographs published in
Varsity as well as a magazine he co-founded,
Image; and did photostories for the
Daily Express, Queen, and (on
night climbing)
Life. He also worked as an assistant to
Larry Burrows and
Burt Glinn. The
Life story led to his expulsion from Cambridge six weeks before his finals. His ambition then was photography as journalism: I wasn't interested in art photography, I was interested in photography as journalism, the last thing I wanted to do was put my photographs on the walls of galleries; I wanted them in magazines. By this time, Bulmer had evolved his own style: intimate close shots of people on the streets and public places done with a wide-angle lens interspersed with compressed views of architecture, industry and townscape with a longer lens. The long lens was also used to isolate a figure on the streets. In addition to Cartier-Bresson, Bulmer admired the work in black and white of
Bill Brandt,
Larry Burrows,
William Klein,
Mark Kauffman, and particularly
Eugene Smith; At the time, most photojournalists looked down on colour photography as commercial; Colour photography was "a medium in which Bulmer was the British pioneer", far ahead of such photographers as
William Eggleston and
Martin Parr. Using colour for the north of England was Bulmer's idea, as was the choice of winter or wet weather, when colour film was yet harder to use. Grant Scott has described the results: Saturated but muted colours combined with [Bulmer's] compositional talent to create images which are time capsules as contemporary today as they were then. However, he continued photography for other publications, making his last story of the north of England in 1976, for the British edition of
Geo. As well as the
BBC, Bulmer also filmed for the
Discovery Channel. For the latter, "Bulmer focused on little-known tribal groups, but treated them as human interest stories rather than exercises in the exotic": a perspective that can also be seen in his early photography. Most of a 17-page "Colour Section" within Harrison's own 1998 book
Young Meteors: British Photojournalism, 1957–1965 is devoted to Bulmer and his colour work of the north of England. Bulmer's career in film continued to the mid-2000s, when he retired and turned to digitising and cataloguing his earlier photographs. Bulmer is married to the sculptor
Angela Conner. The couple live at
Monnington on Wye in a house, Monnington Court, that Bulmer bought in the 1960s and where they breed and train
Morgan horses. ==Films and videos photographed, directed, or produced==