Shaped By War

by Don McCullin

No other photographer in modern times has recorded war and its aftermath as widely and unsparingly as Don McCullin. After a childhood in London during the Blitz, and after the hardships of evacuation, McCullin feels his life has indeed been shaped by war.From the building of the Berlin Wall at the height of the Cold War to El Salvador and Kurdistan, McCullin has covered the major conflicts of the last fifty years, with the notable exception of the Falklands, for which he was denied access. His pictures from the Citadel in Hue and in the ruins of Beirut are among the most unflinching records of modern war. The publication of many of his greatest stories in the Sunday Times magazine did much to raise the consciousness of a generation, even if he himself now fears that photographs cannot prevent history from repeating itself. The brutality of conflict returns over and over again. McCullin here voices his despair.McCullin recounts the course of his professional life in a series of devastating texts on war, the events and the power of photography. The conclusion of the book marks McCullin’s retreat to the Somerset landscape surrounding his home, where the dark skies over England remind him yet again of images of war. Despite the sense of belonging and even contentment, for him there is no final escape.

Genres: Photography, Nonfiction, British Literature, Military History, War

208 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 4, 2010

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

[Keen Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

“This went on day after day after day. Tanks ran over bodies on the road and flattened them like oriental carpets. One day you’d run way and the next day you’d run the other and see a man that you’d been sleeping beside almost head to head now lying dead.”

McCullin’s career saw him explore a number of different genres, but without doubt he is clearly best known for his phenomenal war photography. As we see in here, he didn’t exactly have the easiest of times himself, when growing up. As well as his dad dying at the young age of 40, he had to endure a war of his own, as the Blitz struck London. He was evacuated and was sent to a number of different places. He describes the misery of his last posting,

“I was out in the country on a farm where the people were terribly unpleasant. I started getting beaten by the man of the house because I wouldn’t eat things like boiled potatoes with their skins on. He was very cruel and punched me in the face. We slept on mattresses on the floor. There were no comforts. During the whole seventeen weeks I stayed with that family I never had a bath until the very end. The night before I returned to London, they took one of the dustbins in which they kept the chicken feed. They emptied it and filled it up with hot water.”

Although he started out at the “Observer” where he first came to national and international acclaim, it was at the “Sunday Times” where he would really go onto make his mark on the world of photography. The sheer scale of the people and places he has covered, make for pretty impressive reading, Cyprus, Berlin, the Congo, Vietnam. America’s Deep South, Bangladesh, the Six Day War, Vietnam War, Cambodia, Lebanon, El Salvador, Iraq and Afghanistan, give us an idea of the action and the bloodshed he has witnessed at such close and confronting quarters.

“I never wanted to be described as a ‘war photographer’. It’s like saying you work in an abattoir.”

There are many haunting photographs in here that stay with you, long after you have finished reading. Some of the more powerful ones for me, included the shot consisting of a group of unsuspecting, German bystanders peering over the construction of the Berlin Wall from 1961. The picture of a blood stained footprint in a stairwell in Lebanon, where two men lay dead, and the heart breaking image of a starving albino Biafran in a Nigerian orphanage.

“I can hardly speak the Queen’s English properly, let alone master another person’s language. I’d have to be the greatest linguist in the world to be fully equipped to cross the minefields of problems that confront you on such assignments.”

Looking at the world through the lens of McCullin’s camera, we realise that in many ways the second half of the twentieth century was about millions of people forced to endure the chaotic fallout from the decline of empires after the Second World War. The reluctant surrender of the French colonies was bloody, particularly in Indochina and North Africa, but they can’t quite compare to the rapid decline and deterioration of the British Empire. The British elite had blood on its hands from the famine and disease of West Bengal to the dust scattered lands of Biafra and many places in between. These ruling classes previously content to exploit and profit from these countries, suddenly fled, avoiding any responsibility for the mess they had created, abandoning millions to their fate. They pulled out without offering any meaningful aid or intervention, consigning millions to war, famine and disease as they struggled to rebuild during the often impossible transition into forming independent countries.

“You never stop learning. You never stop discovering. I’m constantly being surprised.” It is apparent that McCullin is an incredibly down to earth man, devoid of pretentiousness. His advanced age and vast experience have clearly given him some profound insights into some horrendous human suffering around the world. He is fairly frank and unflinching when he reflects on many of the aspects of his career. He regularly plays down the importance of his role and the significance of the many rewards he has received. He refuses to regard himself as an artist, and he admits to feelings of guilt and regret at various stages, particularly when he was a lot younger and still inexperienced.

So this is simply an outstanding anthology/biography. Even more than half a century on, we see that many of these photographs, still wield an eerie permanence, with many chilling images that still resonate down the decades. In his series of life long journeys, many of them epic and transformative, he continually captures the horror and the hope. In many ways his work is very much like the photographic equivalent of Norman Lewis or Ryszard Kapuscinski, like them he was bold, adventurous and occasionally found himself under the hail of gun fire during his work, but still, he managed to produce some wonderfully powerful and enduring results.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a wonderful record of McCullin’s outstanding work and also a record of how he came to dislike working at the Times newspaper once Harold Evans was no longer editor. The images are iconic; I’d seen many of them before, especially the one of the Vietnamese soldier at the end, and the one of the Somme, that finish the book.
But to have all these images collected together in one beautiful large book is pretty special, coupled with McCullin’s reflections on his life and career.

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exploring the classics in photography; feast your eyes on these works of art; not all masterpieces but plenty to go around to get you inspired. Many of these collections are long out of print; check out the Internet Archive (https://archive.org); many of the timeless classics are made freely available or after signing up, free to (digitally) borrow.

[Andrew Wiggins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I went to see 'Shaped By War' exhibited at Imperial War Museum North, and found not only a satisfying collection of a talented man's life's work, but a discomfiting combination of the beautiful and the grotesque.

McCullin spent much of his life pursuing life's horrific images, in part so that we back home could see what was going on out there in the world. His photographs from Berlin, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Biafra are what made him a legend of photography, but also an almost hollow shell of a man.

The photographs, coming as they do as one tragedy after another, made me cry. But these are things that we have to see, to acknowledge what unpleasant things are happening away from our own lives. McCullin captures these events in a disturbingly beautiful way.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

An expansion of McCullin' autobiography (Unreasonable Behaviour). Bigger images make for easier viewing. An interesting insight into one of the 20th centuries great photo journalists. It's a dark read, but then McCullin has witnessed much in this world that is dark, or at least the darker side of human beings ability to atrocity. McCullin does portray the very personal side of human tragedy very well. His landscapes and still life work is likewise imbued with a sense of darkness and despair. It has been said of McCullin that he prints too dark....maybe, but then he has borne witness to much that is 'dark' in nature.