McCullin, Don (b. 1935), English photographer. Working always in grainy, black-and-white images, he has moved between social documentary, war photography, landscapes, and special overseas projects. It was his good fortune to hit the renaissance of British photography that took place in the 1960s. Born in a poor area of north London, he trained at Hammersmith School of Arts and Crafts and in the RAF during national service in Kenya. His first piece of reportage, of gang members posing in a bomb-damaged house in Finsbury Park, appeared as an Observer feature on 15 February 1959. He worked as a staffer for the Observer, then for the Sunday Times Magazine, and went freelance in 1985. He became famous, and won many awards, for his coverage of conflicts in the Congo, Cyprus, Israel, Vietnam, Biafra, Cambodia, the Lebanon, and Northern Ireland; some of his images, such as those of a starving albino boy in Biafra and a shell-shocked American soldier in Vietnam, have become icons of 20th-century warfare.
McCullin has prided himself on ‘de-Hollywoodizing’ war, but been scarred in the process. He has reflected at length, in print and on television, on the ethics of recording suffering and death. His book on England, The Homecoming (1979), also shows a sombre vision of alienated, aggressive people living on the margins and in subcultures. In the 1990s a personal retreat brought him to Somerset, where he rediscovered an outer tranquillity he hoped would produce inner peace. He experimented with early photographic processes, but even his close-ups of artichoke plants remained hauntingly dark. By the turn of the 21st century he was back in Africa, working for Christian Aid on an AIDS awareness project. He explained: ‘I sat in England and thought—what is the purpose of my life? … I thought, I don't want to sit in England looking at the beautiful landscape … I'm damn well going to try and make people take notice that we have far too much in the West.’ Since the 1960s he has also made regular visits to India.
— Amanda Hopkinson
Bibliography
- McCullin, D., Unreasonable Behaviour: An Autobiography (1970)
