BLOODSHED IN BLACK & WHITE
Photographer Don McCullin’s work brings us face-to-face with war
‘The jumping-off point for my whole life,” writes the British photojournalist Don McCullin in the catalogue of his new exhibition at the National Gallery in Ottawa, “was based on a terrible act of violence and its consequences.”
Violence and its consequences are the de facto themes of the career retrospective, the first of McCullin’s work in Canada. Frame after frame testify to humanity’s capacity to rain hell down upon its own huddled masses.
One of the 134 photographs shows an American marine hurling a grenade in Vietnam, and the next shows a villager and his young daughter, each bloodied by grenade shrapnel. In Lebanon, Christian soldiers smile and sing over the corpse of a Palestinian girl in the street. In Cyprus, the Congo, Ireland, Bangladesh and elsewhere, it’s the same, soldiers attacking, citizens fleeing if they are able to do so.
There are dead bodies, some grotesquely maimed by bullets or bombs. There are survivors wailing for the dead. It’s a panoply of terror.
The force of it is claustrophobic, and as I walk through the rooms of the exhibition I feel smothered. When I step into the final two rooms, full of still lifes and landscapes, it’s as if the oxygen had suddenly been turned back on. I ask McCullin, how do you witness so much misery and keep going?
“If I was emotionally fragile, I would have had a nervous breakdown and took to drink and drugs and God knows what,” says McCullin, who is now 77 and recognized internationally for his photographs of war and conflict. “There are many factors that kept me sane. I’m sure this would have driven other people over the edge.”
Yet in the 1980s he started to pull away from conflict zones, and more often turned his camera to the stilllife photographs he created in his shed (“an old, outdoor loo”), and landscapes around Somerset in the south of England.
All the photographs in the retrospective are in black and white, as, most likely, have been all photographs you’ve seen by McCullin in the big London newspapers or anywhere else.
With colour, he says during our tour of his work, “you wouldn’t get the same interpretation, you wouldn’t get the same drama, you wouldn’t get the same message. Colour takes you on another journey, it has another meaning. It doesn’t fit with me.”
It’s a unequivocal statement in the latter days of a career that started by chance. In 1958, McCullin was a lad on the rough-and-tumble streets of Finsbury Park in London, where he encountered the seminal act of violence that he cites in the exhibition catalogue. A copper was killed in a fight between two gangs, one of which, the Guvnors, had recently been photographed by McCullin. Suddenly the newspapers wanted the photo, and the young photographer became a photojournalist.
That portrait shows the gang members wearing black suits, skinny ties and an arrogant loucheness. It looks like an album cover of the period. McCullin points out a gang member in another photo who “was a terrific hooligan and spent years in prison.”
The thug still sends McCullin a card every Christmas. “I remember going to prison one day to visit him, and I tore a page out of Playboy and rolled it into a little ball and flicked it through the little gap in the bars. I couldn’t get the whole book in. ”
The early works are a portrait of inequity amid the vast wealth of London.
Destitute men scrabble for lumps of coal in a rubbish heap, while others sleep on the streets. The working class fare marginally better. In one particularly haunting photo, a farmer leads sheep to the slaughterhouse through a cold, grey dawn in the city. The lights, the architecture, the bleak atmosphere of foreboding, it all reminds me of a concentration camp, an allegorical leap that McCullin also sees but did not intend.
He was determined to never turn his camera away from the suffering or atrocities before him. “If I go to war, I’m going to show people suffering. I don’t want you to suffer, but I want you to understand how lucky you are and how unfortunate they are.”
He was often in danger. A photograph from Vietnam shows a U.S. soldier with a bullet wound in his neck, though still giving orders. “He wanted to bring an airstrike on our position,” McCullin recalls, “because he’s in shock, he’s in pain and he’s talking crazy.”
McCullin survived, and continued through wars in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. He earned international awards, and was made a Commander of the British Empire. The honours are unimportant, he says, and people focus too much on awards. He doesn’t even want to be called an artist.
“I’m simply happy to be called a photographer, and I don’t like being called a war photographer,” he says.
“It has a ring of the abattoir about it, doesn’t it? It would like being called an assassin to be called a war photographer ... All I need to do is make these prints, put them on the wall and hope that people will learn something from them.”
He knows the images can be overwhelming, and it’s important that people seeing the exhibition can experience the relief of leaving the violent imagery behind and walking into the rooms of more pleasant, later images. “When you come in here, I want you to calm down and feel a different type of emotion.”
He talks about composing the still lifes, some with apples and plums from his orchard. He talks about the beauty of the landscape. What 77-year-old would leave such peace to return to a war zone? McCullin still does.
“I was in Syria a few weeks ago. I went to Aleppo. Nothing’s changed.”