Hereford Photography Festival

Bridget Coaker, curator of this year’s festival, hopes that the exhibition, featuring the work of nine photographers, will provoke thought and debate about the minefield that photographing children has become, and the images that society deems acceptable.

“As new technologies make taking photographs easier, so too the social constraints that limit what we can take pictures of are expanding,” writes Bridget, a night picture editor for The Guardian and Observer, in her introduction to the exhibition.

“The freedom that photographers once had to document children, playing on the streets, at home or at school, has gone.

“Now photographers, both amateur and professional, have to negotiate the minefield of obtaining permissions, the risk of being branded a pervert and counter our increasing prudishness of what is thought to be an appropriate image of a child.”

In selecting the images, Bridget has been careful to avoid anything that might be seen as controversial, choosing instead images that will avoid the removal of the pictures from the walls, and prompt an understanding about the images that our culture will allow to be seen rather than provoke a heated debate about the issues.

“If we can permit ourselves to look at images of children hanging on the walls of an art gallery, then perhaps we will also begin to discuss whether or not the act of taking a picture of a child is as dangerous as society seems to think it is.”

On Saturday, May 23, the second major exhibition of the festival – John Bulmer Retrospective – opens at Hereford Museum and Art Gallery. John Bulmer, who lives at Monnington Court with his wife, artist Angela Conner, was a pioneer of colour photography in journalism in the 1960s, when colour was widely seen as garish and vulgar and used only in advertising.

Other photographers of the time felt that colour film compromised the integrity and truth of the images they shot. So when the Sunday Times launched its colour supplement in 1962, Bulmer was an obvious choice as a contributor to its first issue.

He worked for the paper for the next 10 years, one of its most prolific contributors, covering both national and international stories.

In 1971, he secured a visa to travel to Burma, one of the first issued after the Second World War.

From the Sunday Times, Bulmer moved to the BBC, where he was given cash to go and make a film, and his career moved sideways into film-making.

Since then, he has directed and photographed more than 40 films for BBC’s Under the Sun, Channel 4 and the Discovery Channel.

One of his recent ethnographic documentaries, Beehives And Runaway Wives, a fascinating portrait of the remote Sheko people of Ethiopia, who live by gathering honey from the highest trees of the rainforest, was shown recently at Borderlines Film Festival.

In conjunction with the exhibition, John Bulmer can also be heard at Hay Festival on Wednes-day, May 27, at 1pm talking to The Guardian’s award-winning photographer Eamonn McCabe about his colour work from the 60s and 70s.

For further information about the exhibitions and other festival events, call 01432 351964. For details of the Hay Festival programme, visit hayfestival.com.