Exhibition of the week Don Mccullin
Tate Britain, London SW1 (020-7887 8888, tate.org.uk). Until 6 May
Don Mccullin is a photographer whose pictures “bear haunting witness to the making of history”, said Rachel Campbell-johnston in The Times. Working as a photojournalist, including for The Observer and The Sunday Times, he has “documented war and its appalling fallout the world over”, producing some of the rawest and most instantly recognisable images of the late 20th century. This exhibition is the first full retrospective of his 60-year career, taking in his distinctive, monochrome photos of everything from the bomb-ravaged streets of his native north London to famine-blighted 1970s Bangladesh and Saddam Hussein’s murderous campaigns against the Kurds. The show brings together hundreds of photographs, some world-famous, others lesser-known, and demonstrates how Mccullin has tirelessly placed himself at “the heart of the moment”, ever ready to present “the visual facts” of conflict “with unflinching honesty”. This is an unforgettable, unmissable exhibition, full of “monumental and timeless” images.
Born in Finsbury Park in 1935, Mccullin began his career photographing local street gangs, said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. Even at this early stage, he maintained a sense of “cool detachment” while getting extraordinarily close to his subjects – an approach that would come to define his war photography. With subsequent series, he repeatedly risked his life to record the truth – but “even when bullets are whizzing past Mccullin’s head, his feel for composition seems never to desert him”. The resulting imagery is often disturbing: in Berlin as the Wall comes up in 1961, he stares over the border zone directly into the eyes of East German guards; his images of the Vietnam War depict “wounded marines collapsing in each other’s arms”; and harrowing pictures from the Cyprus civil war show the bodies of Turkish-cypriots “dead on their kitchen floors”.
Indeed, so unbearable is much of the subject matter that “I had to walk away from certain images”, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. The horrors Mccullin has witnessed include starving children in Biafra, a man dying of Aids in Zimbabwe and the corpse of a Congolese man, “his brains shot out beside his bicycle”. Almost as shocking are the images taken closer to home, documenting the Troubles in Northern Ireland, homelessness in east London and poverty in England’s post-industrial north. Yet Mccullin documents suffering with rare compassion, and though this exhibition is “demanding”, it is an “engrossing” display.