Hay Festival 2013: Veteran reportage photographer John Bulmer hails the digital revolution The veteran reportage photographer John Bulmer - the man responsible for introducing colour photography to the Sunday Times magazine - said on Friday afternoon that he had no objection to the digital revolution. "Freeing up photography for people to use their eyes and brains" was to be welcomed, he said, and added that he didn't think technical difficulty was essential. This ran counter to the obscurantism of many of his cohorts. But Bulmer suggested that mastering the use of a camera was not the point: "What I don't like is photography that doesn't take trouble." Bulmer was speaking to Revel Guest, film producer and Chair of the Hay Festival, with whom he had made a number of documentaries. As they spoke, images passed across a screen behind them, from photographs Bulmer had taken as a student to others more recent. At Cambridge in the Fifties with the likes of Peter Cook, David Frost and Margaret Drabble, Bulmer took his engineering degree a little less seriously than he did photography. His magnificent sequence on "the night climbers," a then-infamous group of pranksters who scaled Senate House and planted a car on the roof, was published in Life magazine. As a reward for his efforts, Bulmer was thrown out of Cambridge. He was a little too late for National Service, and was taken on as a news photographer by the Daily Express, which he described as "combat training of another kind, and far more valuable." But the turning point in his career came in 1960, with a job for Town magazine, then owned by Michael Heseltine, who turned it into a British version of Esquire. Bulmer was sent to portray Nelson, a mill town in Lancashire, and he felt that being able to observe these strangers going about their daily lives was "like a licence to steal." "Nelson," he said, "had a remarkable fortitude and upbeat spirit, which is one of the reasons I came to love the North." The pictures he sent back - wide angles of impoverished streets, children playing, men with snooker cues almost distorted by the ingeniously intimate angle - were both gritty and joyous. For the next decade, he retuned to the North and discovered more desolate parts of it - a woman pinning up her washing on a line in the shadow of a foundry ("I don't think the clothes were much cleaner the next day," Bulmer joked), nuns in the Black Country, unemployed dock workers in Greenock, mothers making ends meet in Hartlepool. On each assignment, he tended to spend three weeks and take up to 1,000 photos. While he was bringing news of these places to London in the Swinging Sixties, he pointed out that to those commissioning such projects, "the North was considered a black and white subject." Its grit was what was expected. So when Bulmer switched to colour, he tried to prove that social realism didn't have to be monochrome, whilst remaining aware, for his own purposes, that colour could be a distraction. He solved this technically by photographing familiar scenes in the dead of winter, shrouded in fog or muted by rain. Reality could be in colour, but it shouldn't be garish. Bulmer described what he was portraying as "the nostalgic remnants of the industrial revolution." A question from the audience, from a man who grew up in the North in the 1960s, raised the intriguing question of whether Bulmer's photographs were nostalgic even at the time. The Swinging Sixties existed north of London, too, he pointed out, and much of the music of the era originated in Northern cities. "I was covering something quite specific," Bulmer replied. But it's true of the images themselves that while they showed something real, and changing, the idiom in which they recorded those things was beautifully, sensitively classical.