This is a beautifully produced book, a huge coffee-table format feast of Don McCullin’s very best photographs, along with a generous helping of many less well-known ones.
War photos
McCullin is well known as one of the great war photographers of the second half of the twentieth century, having been close up to conflict across the world from the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 through to the Iraq War in 2003, taking in conflict in Vietnam, Belfast, Beirut, Cambodia, Congo, Biafra and Israel along the way.
More recent projects
But over the past twenty years, his war years behind him, he’s built a second reputation, as it were, bringing his acute and intense visual sense to a series of peaceful projects –
- taking darkly expressive black-and-white shots of the winter landscape around his farmhouse home in Somerset
- making vivid still lifes which often juxtapose souvenirs from his trips abroad with conventional English props like apples and flowers
- traveling to remote places to meet native tribes and peoples
- and finally to the book of which, according to his autobiography, he is most proud, a three year project to photograph Roman ruins around the Middle East and North Africa
This overview of his nearly 60 years as a photographer includes generous and beautifully produced prints from all these aspects of his long life’s work (McCullin will turn 82 this year). It also features his abiding interest in the rougher side of (peacetime) life in England, which he has criss-crossed over the length of his career, taking photos of working class areas all around the country and which resulted in the book In England.
Sympathy for the underdog
If there’s one thread to almost all the pictures – to his sensibility – it’s a grim sympathy for the underdog. He himself attributes this to his very deprived childhood in rough working class Finsbury Park, compounded by some nightmare experiences with cruel foster homes during his evacuation from the wartime Blitz – to which was added the daily hurt of witnessing his father, severely ill with asthma, decline to his early death aged just 40 and when McCullin was just 14. All of this is described in his autobiography and also in the Shaped by War book.
In the latter book, McCullin that he finds it ‘hurtful’ when critics say his Somerset photos somehow reflect his war experiences. I agree, I think it goes deeper. His decision to photograph the Somerset landscape only in the depths of winter, when it is at its bleakest, the trees are bare and there isn’t a scrap of vegetation in sight, and the fields and tracks are rutted with glacial puddles – this reflects his deeper sensibility which is consistently drawn with unsparing regard to the bleak, the cold, the alienated.
Same with the England photos – photos of the London homesless, the desperately poor of numerous grim northern cities – and – surprisingly – even with the Roman ruin shots. These latter are formally beautiful but McCullin himself points out that after a while he couldn’t help reflecting they were built by slaves in a slave culture based on brutal domination. In the desert silence of some ruin in Jordan, he says he could hear the screams of the slaves and the crack of the whip.
So I don’t think the later work is affected by the war experiences – I think his entire oeuvre is deeply marked by his terrible childhood and his lifelong compassion for the downtrodden and suffering.
Favourites
I thought I could select a few standout images from each genre, but there are so many, so many stunning photos, that it becomes impossible:
- Somerset 2004
- Still life
- West Hartlepool, 1963
- Coal searchers, Sunderland, 1972
- Snowy the mouse man, Cambridge early 1970s
- Protestor, Cuban missile crisis, 1963
- Body of a North Vietnamese soldier, Hue, Vietnam, 1968
- Starving Twenty Four Year Old Mother with Child, Biafra 1968
- Homeless Irishman, Aldgate, London, Great Britain, 1969
- Bangladesh refugee, 1971
- Northern Ireland, Londonderry, 1971
- Early morning at the Kumbh Mela, Allahabad, India, 1989
- Young man press-ganged into the army, South Sudan, 1991
- Irian Jiya, 1992
- Karo tribe, Omo Valley, southern Ethiopia, 2003-2004
- Palmyra
- Somerset
Towards the end I realised what the late works – the Somerset landscapes, the still lifes and the Roman ruins – have in common: no people. In almost every photo up to the turn of the millennium, the focus is on people – soldiers, guerrillas, police, the poor, refugees, the sick and dying.
It’s as if the only way to exclude the pain of humanity, the pain and suffering which humanity seems to inflict on itself without end – is to erase people and their tears from the photos altogether, to completely remove them from the careful compositions of clouds and trees, the juxtapositions of exquisite statuettes and bowls of fruit, the ancient columns in the desert.
But even then, are they still weeping from the wintry puddles? Are they still crying out from the silent stones? Can the sound of the suffering ever be silenced?
Documentary by Jacqui Morris
In 2012 McCullin was the subject of a feature-length documentary film, directed by David Morris and Jacqui Morris, which tells his life story in chronological order, with lots of contemporary newsreel footage giving the background to the conflicts he covered, along with his understated, insightful reflections on his career and on the troubled role of ‘war photographer’. The steady accumulation of horrors becomes, by the end, unbearable.
Credit
Don McCullin (Revised edition) was published by Jonathan Cape in 2015.
Related links
- Don McCullin on Amazon
- Review of Shaped by War by Don McCullin
- Review of Unreasonable Behaviour by Don McCullin
- India by Don McCullin on Amazon
- Don McCullin In Africa on Amazon
- Southern Frontiers: A Journey Across The Roman Empire by Don McCullin on Amazon
- 2016 Don McCullin interview with the Financial Times
- Don McCullin Wikipedia article
- Review of Tim Page’s Nam (1983)
- Review of Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977)
Reviews of photography exhibitions
- The Radical Eye @ Tate Modern (March 2017)
- Malick Sidibé @ Somerset House (January 2017)
- Painting with Light @ Tate Britain (August 2016)
- Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century @ the Victoria and Albert Museum (June 2016)
- Unseen City: Photos by Martin Parr @ Guildhall Art Gallery (March 2016)
- Performing for the camera @ Tate Modern (March 2016)
- Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers @ Barbican Art (March 2016)
- The World of Charles and Ray Eames @ the Barbican (November 2015)
- Peter Kennard @ Imperial War Museum London (April 2015)
- Salt and Silver @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
- Beard @ Somerset House (March 2015)
- Conflict, Time, Photography @ Tate Modern (March 2015)
- Dennis Hopper – The Last Album @ Royal Academy (August 2014)
- Only in England @ the Science Museum (March 2014)
- Man Ray Portraits @ the National Portrait Gallery (April 2013)
- Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s @ the Barbican (November 2012)
