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John Bulmer's haunting images go on display

Feb 7 2010 by Michael Kelly, Sunday Sun

Photograph by John Bulmer of miners at Dawdon Colliery

IN the early 1960s John Bulmer was part of a group of photographers that included David Bailey and Don McCullin who were called the Young Meteors.

But while war and swinging Britain interested them, John, brought up in Herefordshire by the famous cider-making family, turned his attention to the North.

He was commissioned by the Sunday Times colour magazine to illustrate a long piece by Arthur Hopcraft whose title began: “The North is dead . . . ”

Accounts of this groundbreaking piece often leave it at that, but the headline actually went on: “. . . long live the new North”, and Bulmer’s pictures proved the key.

An exhibition called Northern Soul, which has just opened at the National Coal Mining Museum near Wakefield, shows why.

There are the usual cobbles, chimneys and grim faced miners but for probably the first time, a photo-documentary in a national magazine showed some of them in colour when previously, as John says today, the North was seen as “entirely a black-and-white subject”.

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