Don McCullin: The New Definitive Edition

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In November 2020, it was announced Angelina Jolie would be directing a biopic about McCullin, with Tom Hardy in the starring role. It is being adapted from McCullin's biography Unreasonable Behaviour by Gregory Burke. [21] Publications [ edit ] Émile Béchard, Femme du Luxor from McCullin's personal selection of photographs from the National Media Museum's collection, 2009.

After a career spanning sixty years, Sir Don McCullin, once a witness to conflict across the globe, has become one of the great landscape photographers of our time. McCullin’s pastoral view is far from idyllic. Though the woods and stream close to his house in Somerset have offered some respite, he has not sought out the quiet corners of rural England. He is drawn, instead, to the drama of approaching storms. He has an acute sense of how the emptiness of his immediate landscape echoes a wider tone of disquiet. He is not alone in his preference for darkened clouds over clear skies. McCullin’s West Country is not far removed from the East Anglia of Constable’s Dedham Vale two centuries earlier. His knowledge of his historical predecessors places him deep in a Romantic tradition. His experience as a traveller reinforces the sense of a man on the edge of civilisation under siege. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his repeated views of the glories of Palmyra and of the destruction of this ancient Syrian city. His career seems to have been a mix of visits to places in the midst of terrible conflict and more cultural coverage. A lot of which we here in the UK either quietly ignored at the time or have totally forgotten about now - Cyprus, the Middle-East, South and Central America, Vietnam, Cambodia and various parts of Africa. His life was often at risk in these places (and he mentions time and time again journalists and photographers that died in the places he managed to get away from.) His work was either for continental magazines or for British newspapers, initially the Observer and then the Times and Sunday Times.Peres, Michael R.; Osterman, Mark; Romer, Grant B.; Lopez, J. Tomas (2008). The Concise Focal Encyclopedia of Photography. Focal Press. ISBN 978-0-240-80998-4. In 1982 the British government refused to grant McCullin a press pass to cover the Falklands War, claiming the boat was full. [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] At the time he believed it was because the Thatcher government felt his images might be too disturbing politically. 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.

No one can see these pictures without asking the question: 'How can he take them?' The book helps considerably, by showing how McCullin stumbled into photography, and especially into war photography, largely by accident, although it would of course have been impossible without his latent talent. By reading it, we can get a degree of incite into what drives him, how he copes with the events that he captures on film, and how his job affects the rest of his life. Even reading his words and seeing a comprehensive display of his work, though, give only a partial insight. What can it really have been like to run into hails of bullets, to see soldiers shot beside you and, even worse, see the suffering of innocent families drawn into war?Don McCullin (1994). Sleeping with Ghosts: A Life's Work in Photography. London: Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-03241-0.