Don McCullin

Don McCullin is one of the greatest photographers of conflict in our time. His career has covered much of the latter part of the twentieth century -- a relentlessly photographed century steeped in conflict. This book is conceived on a scale that does justice to his extraordinary life. The book begins and ends in the Somerset landscape that surrounds his home. McCullin views a mythical England in the shadow of Glastonbury Tor beneath black, almost biblical, skies. The book then follows the chronology of his life, starting in the back streets of Finsbury Park in the fifties and going on to unpublished work recording the construction of the Berlin Wall, a landmark in his lifetime. McCullin's photographs reveal a ravaged northern England, wars in Cyprus, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia and Beirut, riots in Derry, and famine and disease in Bangladesh. All are photographed with unswerving compassion. The sequence reaches a climax among the cannibals and tribespeople deep in the jungles of Irian Jaya, as if McCullin's gaze had come to rest far from the clutter and debris of his time, focused on humanity in an almost Stone Age condition.

As resonant as some of Goya's most terrifying imagery, collectively McCullin's photographs constitute one of the great documents of human conflict and its attendant grief, expressed with a visual lyricism that allows us to glimpse the unbearable. The introduction is written by Harold Evans, former Editor of the Sunday Times and The Times, a leading authority on photojournalism, who worked closely with McCullin over much of his career with the Sunday Times Magazine. The introduction is accompanied by an essay by Susan Sontag, the distinguished novelist, essayist and author of On Photography (1977).