Don McCullin: The New Definitive Edition

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This autobiography recounts his many incidents along with photographs. I was taken in by his descriptions of his impoverished upbringing during World War II in London. Both he and his sister were evacuated during the blitz and the threatened Nazi invasion. At some stage after the war, he acquired a camera and his career slowly took off. But,as he risked his life for the newspaper,the paper's ownership changed hands.Now,it wanted glamour for its magazine section rather than pictures of human suffering in distant wars. Sir Don McCullin was born in 1935 and grew up in a deprived area of north London. He got his first break when a newspaper published his photograph of friends who were in a local gang. From the 1960s he forged a career as probably the UK’s foremost war photographer, primarily working for the Sunday Times Magazine. His unforgettable and sometimes harrowing images are accompanied in the show with his brutally honest commentaries. Hollywood types have never impressed me much. It’s doctors, aid workers and teachers who I admire. People who dedicate their lives to humanity, with dignity and kindness.

He is the author of a number of books, including The Palestinians (with Jonathan Dimbleby, 1980), Beirut: A City in Crisis (1983) and Don McCullin in Africa (2005). His book, Shaped by War (2010) was published to accompany a retrospective exhibition at the Imperial War Museum North, Salford, England in 2010 and then at the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath and the Imperial War Museum, London. His most recent publication is Southern Frontiers: A Journey Across the Roman Empire, a poetic and contemplative study of selected Roman and pre-Roman ruins in North Africa and the Middle East. 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. Despite many of his trips, McCullin also describes the impact of his work on his personality and personal life and is very honest. Old age is making me frail. I stumble sometimes. I just had an operation to remove a tumour. I’m unfazed by the pain.One,in particular,caught my attention.In Beirut,teenage boys play music and laugh while a corpse lies in the foreground. 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." [50]

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." I’m a man consumed by regrets. Abandoning my first wife and family for another woman is a big one I think about daily. And as a father, I can’t say I’ve been great. In my line of work, travel was constant. I was so rarely there. In retrospect, it was rather shameful. McCullin, Donald; Lewis Chester (2002). Unreasonable Behaviour, An Autobiography. Vintage Books. pp.28–29. ISBN 978-0-09-943776-5.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.

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. In my teenage years, I became obsessed with Vietnam war films. I devoured everyone I could come across. Big or small budgets made no difference to me. But these films were never going to entirely capture what it was like for the men and women who served out there. So I turned to the literary world in hopes of gleaming just a fraction of what it was like to have had boots on the ground. As I scoured the available information a set of photos came up time and again. With just a little digging the name Dom McCullin came up. His images of the war seemed to capture some of the true horrors of what they faced in a raw and unfiltered way that I think the general public had not really been exposed to before. A great many years later I was able to go to an exhibit of his works this time however it was of the landscape of his home county. As it turns out just a few miles away from where I live. It was fascinating to see someone's work switched to a completely different subject matter. Yet his work still had the same ability to make you stop and just stare as if held by some unseen force. 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.

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Shaped By War: Photographs by Don McCullin, Imperial War Museum North". The Independent. 7 February 2010 . Retrieved 2 May 2018.