Don McCullin
Today, Photojournalist Don McCullin’s work still secures the response that it so greatly received back in the 1960’s and 70’s. McCullin worked for The Observer, The Sunday Times and other commissioning magazines, who sent him on assignments, photographically reporting the stories that led from the ensuing wars around the world. McCullin used his camera as a witness to its surroundings: a tool that hoped could influence action. McCullin said “I knew things were wrong. That’s why I photographed them… I wanted to take pictures for the immediate consumption, to correct whatever wrongs they’re depicting.”
Don McCullin was first sent out to photograph the growing hostilities between the Turkish and Greek communities in Cyprus in early 1964 and then the struggle of power in the Congo in the latter part of 1964. It was the arrival of the colour supplements in the mid Sixties that demanded the vital part of photo-journalism in story telling. The developing war in Vietnam was were McCullin wished to be sent, he was suspicious of America’s involvement, and wished to get there as soon as possible. Following the Vietnam War, McCullin covered the starvation in Biafra. For McCullin to see the result of war and the cruelty of starvation, he felt he no longer wished to show concern for the soldiers in action but instead turned his attentions to the tragic consequences of war. After Biafra came the refugees in Bangladesh, the war in Cambodia, Beruit and Iraq.
Don McCullin’s most recent work concentrates on still life and landscape photography. A collection of McCullin’s landscapes of Somerset were published in ‘Open Skies’ (1989)
“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 practice 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.”
