John Bulmer was in his second year of an engineering degree at Cambridge University in the late 1950s when a recently graduated friend tipped him off about the night climbers, a secretive group of students who spent their nights scaling the tops of the college buildings. Though he wasn’t keen on heights, as a photographer who had already started to sell pictures to the national press, the opportunity was too good to pass up. So he started tracking their movements, enlisting a helper to fire off an old-fashioned flashbulb as he worked. “I wanted to photograph them in their environment, so quite often I used wide angle lenses and open flashes, because you can’t climbup a building with a tripod,” he explains.
