Don McCullin
Sir 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 in 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.
War became a mainstay of Don’s journalism for the next two decades, 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.
Don McCullin has been shot and wounded in Cambodia, imprisoned in Uganda, expelled from Vietnam, and had a bounty on his head in Lebanon. He has faced bullets and bombs not only to capture the perfect shot but also to assist dying soldiers and wounded civilians. Compassion drives his work, both in war zones and beyond. Away from conflict, McCullin has focused on the suffering of the poor, producing powerful essays on London’s homeless and Britain’s working-class communities.
From the early 1980s, he shifted towards more peaceful subjects, travelling through Indonesia, India, and Africa, documenting places and people with little Western contact. In 2010, he published Southern Frontiers, a dark portrayal of the Roman Empire’s legacy in North Africa and the Middle East. He has also spent three decades capturing the English countryside, particularly Somerset, and creating still lifes, receiving widespread acclaim. Yet the draw of conflict remains strong; in October 2015, McCullin travelled to Kurdistan, documenting the Kurds’ struggles with ISIS, Syria, and Turkey.
