Don McCullin

Photo Poche #53

by Don McCullin

Etre photographe de guerre pour McCullin, c'est être au plus près, c'est risquer sa vie pour montrer la mort des autres, à Chypre, au Viêt-Nam, au Salvador...

Genres: Photography

144 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2006

About the author

Don McCullin grew up in north London and was evacuated in 1940 to Somerset. He failed the eleven-plus examination and went to Tollington Park Secondary Modern School. He won a trade art scholarship to the Hammersmith School of Arts and Crafts and Buildings. His father, who was an invalid, died, aged forty and McCullin was forced to find work to earn money for the family. He became a pantry boy on the London, Midland and Scottish Railway dining cars, travelling between London and Manchester. In 1950 he went to work in a cartoon animation studio in Mayfair before the Observer newspaper bought one of his gangland pictures and set him on the road as a photojournalist. He moved to the Sunday Times, where he worked for eighteen years. His photographs of almost every major conflict in his adult lifetime until the Falklands war provide some of the most potent images of the twentieth century. His pictures are in major museum collections all over the world. He is the holder of many honours and awards, including the C.B.E. His home is in a Somerset village.

Reviews

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting book, quite concise and easy to read, featuring some of his outstanding war photography. There is also a timeline at the back of the book so you can see what he has done throughout his life, and the various projects he has worked on.

[Brian Page · Rating 4 out of 5]

Admittedly, there is not much reading involved in this slim Thames & Hudson volume on Don McCullin aside from the short but poignant autobiographical sketch in the preface. McCullin is important and he packs a lot of insight into those few pages. The print quality of the 63 photographs is excellent; and since I’ll never even hope to acquire McCullin’s recent definitive £995.00 three-volume Irreconcilable Truths, I can heartedly recommend this little Photofile publication as a consolation prize.

Sir Don is one photographer in the very small pantheon of elite conflict photographers; and his images are haunting. It’s the eyes. He goes for the eyes. Interestingly, the photos in this collection are not in chronologic or even geographic order. A photo from 1964 might be next to one from the year 2002. Perhaps this is a statement on how the only constant across the years is mankind’s inhumanity. The suffering & misery remain the same and only the year changes. McCullin: “I knew that my pictures had to have a message. But what message? I couldn’t have said – except, perhaps, that I wanted to break the hearts and spirits of secure people.” They do. They should.