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.
Following an impoverished north London childhood blighted by Hitler's bombs and the early death of his father, McCullin was called up for National Service with the RAF. After postings to Egypt, Kenya and Cyprus he returned to London armed with a twin reflex Rolleicord camera and began photographing friends from a local gang named The Guv'nors. Persuaded to show them to the picture editor at the Observer in 1959, aged 23, he earned his first commission and began his long and distinguished career in photography more by accident than design.
In 1961 he won the British Press Award for his essay on the construction of the Berlin Wall. His first taste of war came in Cyprus, 1964, where he covered the armed eruption of ethnic and nationalistic tension, winning a World Press Photo Award for his efforts. In 1993 he was the first photojournalist to be awarded a CBE.
For the next two decades war became a mainstay of Don's journalism, initially for the Observer and, from 1966, for The Sunday Times. In the Congo, Biafra, Uganda, Chad, Vietnam, Cambodia, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland and more, he time and again combined a mastery of light and composition with an unerring sense of where a story was headed, and a bravery that pushed luck to its outermost limits.
He has been shot and badly wounded in Cambodia, imprisoned in Uganda, expelled from Vietnam and had a bounty on his head in Lebanon. What's more, he has braved bullets and bombs not only to get the perfect shot but to help dying soldiers and wounded civilians. Compassion is at the heart of all his photography.
Away from war Don's work has often focused on the suffering of the poor and underprivileged and he has produced moving essays on the homeless of London's East End and the working classes of Britain's industrialised cities.
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.
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.
By Mark Holborn, Harold Evans, Susan Sontag, Don McCullin
Publisher : Publisher : Aperture
2015 | 352 pages
First published in 2001, this retrospective survey offers both an examination of Don McCullin's photographic career as well as a record of half a century of international conflict. Coinciding with the photographer's eightieth birthday, this expanded edition of Don McCullin serves as fitting homage to a photographer who dedicated his life to the front line in order to deliver compassionate visual testament to human suffering. With texts by Mark Holborn, Harold Evans and Susan Sontag, and photographs taken by McCullin in England, Cyprus, Vietnam, the Congo, Biafra, Northern Ireland, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Beirut, this is an essential volume on one of the legendary photographers of the 20th century.
"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."
British photographer Don McCullin (born 1935) began his professional photographic career in 1959, and dedicated himself to photographing war, conflict, disease and poverty around the world, turning in his later years to landscape and still-life photography in his native England.
An exhibition catalog that features an impressive retrospective, covering the last fifty years in chronological order. Don McCullin (born 1935, London) is one of the most important photographers of our time. For more than fifty years, his uncompromising black-and-white photographs have shaped our awareness and understanding of modern conflict and its consequences. His images tell the remarkable story of his life and work, including his most famous assignments in Berlin, Vietnam, Cambodia, Biafra, Bangladesh, and the Middle East. The Winner of the Warsaw Gold Medal and the World Press Photographer Award, he was awarded the ICP Cornell Capa Award in 2006. Key periods in McCullin’s life, including his early experiences of evacuation and the Blitz, his commissions from Berlin in 1961 and Cyprus in 1964, and his most famous work for the Sunday Times are here explored alongside more recent projects with Christian Aid, his photographs of last tribes in the Omo River Valley, South Kenya, and Irian Jaya, New Guinea, and, in the last few years, those of still-life and English landscapes at his home in Somerset. A photographic journey across the ruins and landscapes of the boundaries of the Roman Empire completes the volume.
Don McCullin’s view of England is rooted in two worlds—his wartime childhood, and his youth in 1950s Finsbury Park. His first published photograph was a picture of a gang from his neighborhood, which appeared in a newspaper after a local murder. McCullin always balanced his anger at the unacceptable face of the nation with tenderness or compassion, and in this collection, he envisions his home country with its perpetual social gulf between the affluent and the desperate in mind. He continues in the same black and white tradition as he did between foreign assignments for the Sunday Times in the 1960s and 1970s, when his view of a deprived Britain seemed as dark as the conflict zones from which he had just escaped. This book marks his return to the cities and landscape he knew as a young photographer, adding wry humor to his famed lyricism. At a time when we might believe the world has changed beyond our imagination, McCullin shows us a view of England where the line between the wealthy and the impoverished is as defined as ever, the nation as a whole as absurd as it is tragic.
Don McCullin is one of the great photojournalists of our times. In recent years, his travels have taken him to some of the world’s remotest regions, and his skill and empathy have gained him access to tribes on the edge of civilization. Over the last two years, he has traveled from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia to the valley of the Omo River leading to the border with Sudan. There he entered the tribal lands of the Suma, the Gheleb, the Bume, the Erbore, the Bene, the Bodi, the Karo, the Hamar, and the Mursi. Beyond dignity, there is a heroic aspect to his subjects; we, the viewers, can be amazed by their strength and beauty, and all the more so because McCullin’s compassionate artistry enables us to understand their vulnerability.
Tom Price is the Photographer of the Year, winner of All About Photo Awards 2021 - The Mind's Eye. My co-jurors Keith Cullen, Denis Dailleux, Stefano De Luigi, Monica Denevan, Claudine Doury, Ann Jastrab, Stephan Vanfleteren, Hiroshi Watanabe, Alison Wright and myself were impressed by his work 'Porter' taken from a series of surreal portraits, featuring 'relocated' porters from Kolkata, as a reflection on the experience of migrant workers.
Alternative photography pioneer Jill Enfield comes from a long line of photographers dating back to 1875-the date when her ancestors opened up gift stores in Germany where they sold cameras and other technical equipment. In 1939, after fleeing Nazi Germany, her family opened the first camera store in Miami Beach, where as a child, Jill roamed the aisles. It is easy to imagine that she grew up always having a camera in her hands. With photography imprinted in her DNA, her career path seemed inevitable.
Michael Nguyen is a street and documentary photographer living near Munich, Germany. He is also the co-founder of Tagree Magazine. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
Jon Enoch is a London-based photographer who focuses on portrait and lifestyle photography for advertising and media publications, as well as large organisations. He has won numerous awards for his Vietnamese photography portrait series called cBikes of Hanoi', including the Smithsonian Grand Prize; the Lens Culture Portrait Award and the Portraits of Humanity Award in 2020. The images were also shortlisted for the Sony World Photography Award and they won the gold Prix de la Photographie Paris (Px3) award in 2019. The set of portrait images were featured on the BBC, the Guardian, the Telegraph and went viral on websites across the world.
Olivera Stegmann is a Swiss photographer and also the winner of AAP Magazine #16 Shadows with his project 'Circus Noir'. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
Francesco Gioia is an Italian photographer who lives in England. He is the winner of AAP Magazine 15 Streets with his project 'Wake Up in London'. We asked him a few questions about his life and work
Paul Brouns is a Dutch photographer who found his voice by capturing architecture. The urban landscape is his ideal playground for apprehending rhythm, color and geometrical elements. He is the winner of AAP Magazine 14 "Colors" with his project 'Urban Tapestries'. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
Referred to as someone who "captures the souls of his models", (Wanderlust Travel Magazine, 2018) Réhahn is more than just a man behind a camera. Behind each click is a story. Whether the photograph shows a child with startling blue eyes, a woman pulling a needle through indigo fabric or a man walking alone down a brightly painted street, these are more than just images to Réhahn. They are the culmination of an experience. The stories of his subjects as well as his passion to learn more about their culture, diversity and changing traditions are what drives Réhahn's work.
Craig Varjabedian's photographs of the American West illuminate his profound connection with the region and its people. His finely detailed images shine with an authenticity that reveals the ties between identity, place, and the act of perceiving. For Varjabedian, photography is a receptive process driven by openness to the revelation each subject offers, rather than by the desire to manipulate form or to catalog detail. He achieves this vision by capturing and suspending on film those decisive moments in which the elements and the spirit of a moment come together
Do you like cookies? 🍪 We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website, to show you personalized content and to analyze our website traffic. Learn more
