United Kingdom • Born in 1935

Life, Death and Everything in Between

Don McCullin has a complex relationship with war. He has even said that he chases conflict like an alcoholic chases beer. From Cyprus to Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, El Salvador and Ireland, it was as a pioneering photojournalist – alongside the likes of Capa, Jones Griffiths and Burrows – that he elevated the discipline to an art form. His photos enable the general public to stay abreast of what is happening thousands of miles away from home, in photos that shake up public opinion and prick consciences.

Born in 1935 in the working-class district of Finsbury Park in London, Don McCullin began his career almost by chance when, in 1959, one of his photos of « T he Guvnors » gang was published by The Observer after the murder of a policeman. While violence is central to the public’s understanding of his work, it is not its sole facet. Alongside his reportage work, Don McCullin took an interest in marginalised populations in his own city, photographing the homeless, migrants and workers. It was here that his social perspective emerged, inherited from his London upbringing. As an early witness to the prevailing misery, he was able to pinpoint breakdowns in the social fabric of his country, the people left behind by industrialisation and the drop-outs of globalisation.

He was knighted by the Queen in 2017, and is one of the few photographers to have received this distinction for his exceptional career. Today, he lives in Somerset and devotes his time to landscape photography. As surprising as it might seem at first, this transition perhaps isn’t as unexpected as it seems. In the cloudy skies of the English countryside or the tortured ruins of Palmyra in Syria, Don McCullin continues to see the scars of both history and violence. His photos, even of peaceful places, seem to be laced with gunpowder in an eternal echo of the theatres of war that have irrevocably shaped his gaze.

LE GARAGE