Don McCullin: The New Definitive Edition

Product Information

At home he has spent three decades chronicling the English countryside – in particular the landscapes of Somerset – and creating meticulously constructed still lifes all to great acclaim. Yet he still feels the lure of war. As recently as October 2015 Don travelled to Kurdistan in northern Iraq to photograph the Kurds’ three-way struggle with ISIS, Syria and Turkey. I found it ironic that I was reading about Don McCullin’s time in 1971 in the Bogside area of Derry in Northern Ireland, on Good Friday 2019, the day after a resurgence of serious unrest in Derry resulted in the death of a journalist, doing exactly what McCullin was doing 38 years ago…

It’s difficult to describe the inhumanity I’ve seen. My upbringing, I think, prepared me. I was exposed to all sorts, early on. Had I been more sophisticated, I’d have had a mental breakdown decades ago. From the early 1980s increasingly he focused his foreign adventures on more peaceful matters. He travelled extensively through Indonesia, India and Africa returning with powerful essays on places and people that, in some cases, had few if any previous encounters with the Western world. In 2010 he published Southern Frontiers, a dark and at-times menacing record of the Roman Empire's legacy in North Africa and the Middle East. Sir Donald McCullin CBE (born 9 October 1935) is a British photojournalist, particularly recognised for his war photography and images of urban strife. His career, which began in 1959, has specialised in examining the underside of society, and his photographs have depicted the unemployed, downtrodden and impoverished.I had long been uncomfortable with my label of war photographer, which suggested an almost exclusive interest in the suffering of other people. I knew I was capable of another voice.” Don McCullin is one of our greatest living photographers. Few have enjoyed a career so long; none one of such variety and critical acclaim. For the past 50 years he has proved himself a photojournalist without equal, whether documenting the poverty of London's East End, or the horrors of wars in Africa, Asia or the Middle East. Simultaneously he has proved an adroit artist capable of beautifully arranged still lifes, soulful portraits and moving landscapes. McCullin’s pictures can often rest upon cruel contradictions and absurdities. In a scene of horror from Beirut in 1976, a group of young Phalangist fighters, one strumming a mandolin, appear to rejoice amidst the slaughter, a singing troupe indifferent to the remains of the dead Palestinian girl before them. I photograph landscapes now. I’m not a man at peace. I still carry guilt and pain within me. Landscapes take my mind off all I’ve seen. It’s like therapy. It’s healing.

I have been manipulated, and I have in turn manipulated others, by recording their response to suffering and misery. So there is guilt in every direction: guilt because I don't practise religion, guilt because I was able to walk away, while this man was dying of starvation or being murdered by another man with a gun. And I am tired of guilt, tired of saying to myself: "I didn't kill that man on that photograph, I didn't starve that child." That's why I want to photograph landscapes and flowers. I am sentencing myself to peace." [49]I have been travelling the world for the past 65 years – so I can’t explain how Turkey evaded me until recently. A couple of years ago, I had the great pleasure of meeting the charming Turkish Ambassador to London at the time, Ümit Yalçın, and it was with his blessing, and alongside my dear friend, the author Barnaby Rogerson, that we embarked on a series of journeys to discover the remains of Roman Turkey. McCullin, Donald; Lewis Chester (2002). Unreasonable Behaviour, An Autobiography. Vintage Books. pp.28–29. ISBN 978-0-09-943776-5.

Don McCullin biography". Under Fire: Images from Vietnam. Piece Unique Gallery. Archived from the original on 11 March 2007 . Retrieved 30 March 2007. Old age is making me frail. I stumble sometimes. I just had an operation to remove a tumour. I’m unfazed by the pain.

Retailers:

a b Cadwalladr, Carole (22 December 2012). "Don McCullin: 'Photojournalism has had it. It's all gone celebrity' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 22 March 2014. I have long admired Don McCullin's heroic journey through some of the most appalling zones of suffering in the last third of the 20th century," Sontag wrote in her essay. "We now have a vast repository of images that make it harder to preserve such moral defectiveness. Let the atrocious images haunt us Seeing reality in the form of an image cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers." Angelina Jolie to direct biopic of photographer Don McCullin starring Tom Hardy". The Guardian. 19 November 2020 . Retrieved 22 November 2020. While most of us were sheltering from Covid, Don explored the mountains, valleys and coast of western Turkey, hunting out the most poignant and powerful ruins of the Roman Empire. He has created a meditation on landscape, the effects of light on ancient stone, the way clouds animate the past, but it is also inescapably about past conflict. About conquest, about imperium, about power.

Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Award". Archived from the original on 1 December 2012 . Retrieved 13 August 2012. Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.” He was left all alone as he recalled all the human suffering he had witnessed during his career.He also wondered if it had been worth it to take so many risks,just for getting some photographs.

Don McCullin is one of our greatest living photographers. Few have enjoyed a career so long; none one of such variety and critical acclaim. For the past 50 years he has proved himself a photojournalist without equal, whether documenting the poverty of London’s East End, or the horrors of wars in Africa, Asia or the Middle East. Simultaneously he has proved an adroit artist capable of beautifully arranged still lifes, soulful portraits and moving landscapes. The landscapes in Britain and Southern Frontiers occupy the final rooms of the retrospective. We see them after seeing all the horrors that McCullin has photographed—an aesthetic reward, of sorts. But at the same time this turn to the pictorial, is not that far removed from what came before. Pictorial form has always been central to his photography. In 2012 there was an excellent documentary released about him, which I recommend highly so it surprises me that I have only just got around to reading it now considering it was published in 1992 (and I don't think it has been updated for this edition, although I am ready to be corrected.) It is the story of his career and life, although after the latter forms more the top and tail of the book than the former.