Review: Shaped by War
I wanted to have a chat with Don McCullin for this book review, then I thought about all the times he’s been interviewed over the years and felt he hardly needed another inquisitor. He was the photographer that got me interested in taking black and white pictures, although I’d been aware of his photographs for many years before, as my father used to buy The Sunday Times newspaper and the colour magazine that came with it always seemed packed with his work.
His first published shots were of friends in his own neighbourhood, they were part of a street gang going about their business and had asked to have their picture taken. Not long after they were involved in a dispute with a rival gang and a policeman was stabbed to death. McCullin phoned up The Observer newspaper to ask would they be interested in his photographs of the gang members, it was 1959 and the start of his career. But war made his name; Cyprus, Vietnam, Palestine, Biafra, Northern Ireland were the places you’d find him. Although there’s evidence of colour shots somewhere, when I think of him it’s always in black and white.
Homecoming was his response to the years of war pictures he’d taken, it’s the first of his books that I purchased. Even though now out of print you can find copies through online bookshops, but there have been other publications (Hearts of Darkness, Open Skies, Sleeping with Ghosts, Shaped by War which is a recent book accompanied by an exhibition) but Homecoming is still my favourite. It’s a big hardcover book with nearly two hundred pages, each of them almost the quality of the original print with some of the double page spreads looking so intense they’re abstract, even medieval. Save for one or two, every picture is of an England decades before email, iphone or credit crunch but plenty isn’t working, much is crumbling if not broken. Even the crowd pictures are lonely. These scenes haven’t gone away, the racism, bad housing, delinquency; Don McCullin could shoot the same things again today and tomorrow, using the contrasting hard edge monotones that he made his own. Often he would say that his early childhood in Finsbury Park, North London of poverty, violence and bigotry prepared him well for photojournalism. It would also toughen him to find something better and never diminish his anger at the unfairness of class systems. The pictures reflect his feelings loyally, rooms without heating, families and no fathers, the neglected elderly, subdued minorities alongside boisterous unemployed, all underwritten by political neglect. There’s a good chunk of pages at the back of the book where he’s written almost a commentary on the photographs but also about his feelings on shooting in his homeland after years of soldier pictures and famine shots. The back cover of the book has an unromanticized portrait of the author in amongst waiting American Marines, he’s not armed but what’s hanging round his neck looks just as hostile.
Now he wants away from that fury, so for the past three years he’s involved himself in a project photographing Roman ruins. I haven’t seen any of the pictures although I did get a chance to hear him talk to the BBC’s Kate Adie at the Imperial War Museum, it would’ve been handy to have heard more of his words, they are still soft with compassion if a touch exhausted. Technology has made him repeat so much and the current Shaped By War exhibition at the IWM is in some ways a part of this old road. Although he hasn’t been to a battle for nearly thirty years, his landscapes, still lives and social commentary are still shell shocked. The exhibition is by no means a definitive collection, but there are many good things to see and you would be able to thumb through books that cover all stages of a lengthy and at times, haunted career that began at 23 and is only now starting to slow down at 76.
Images: Copyright Don McCullin.
Posted by: Stuart Simpson
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