U.K. photographer bristles at ‘war’ label
LONDON — Don McCullin’s most famous photographs burn with the physical and emotional brutality of conflict: a shell-shocked American soldier in Vietnam, a starving woman and child in Nigeria’s breakaway Biafra.
But don’t call him a war photographer.
“I hate that,” said the 83-yearold British photojournalist, sitting in an exhibition of six decades’ worth of his images of damaged people, ravaged landscapes and scarred cities. “I’ve wilfully changed direction because I didn’t want to get stuck in the war direction, people calling me a war photographer.”
The retrospective of more than 250 photographs opened Tuesday and runs to May 6 at Tate Britain , the country’s foremost gallery of U.K. art. But don’t call McCullin an artist.
“I hate that, too,” said McCullin, who is charming with a combative undercurrent. “I’m not an artist. I’m a photographer, and that’s all there is to it.”
McCullin’s career began almost by chance, with a photo of young gang members he knew from Finsbury Park, the tough London neighbourhood where he grew up. A shot of the group — The Guv’nors — standing in a bombedout building had a powerful combination of squalor and swagger that caught the attention of British newspapers.
“Once that was published in The Observer, I could see a life for myself rather than hanging around with those boys,” McCullin said. “So I made this journey into photography, and it’s been extraordinary, really.”
McCullin plunged into many of the 20th century’s conflict zones: Cold War Berlin, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia, Congo, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Iraq.
His images, always in black and white, powerfully capture the emotions of war — the raw grief of a woman in Cyprus who has just learned of her husband’s death; the devastation of an American GI; the exhilaration of youths in Northern Ireland throwing stones at soldiers.
His lens looked just as unflinchingly at his home country. From the 1950s onwards, McCullin captured a side of Britain scarred by poverty, violence and decay. It’s tough stuff, though his images of holidaymakers at the seaside have a defiant cheerfulness.
McCullin survived physical danger and brushes with death. A glass case at the exhibition holds a Nikon camera that stopped a bullet hitting him in Cambodia.
He didn’t escape an emotional toll, and in recent years has turned to quieter subjects — “to eradicate the past,” McCullin says in an exhibition note.