Don McCullin: The New Definitive Edition

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Don McCullin’s view of England is rooted in two worlds—his wartime childhood, and his youth in 1950s Finsbury Park. His first published photograph was a picture of a gang from his neighborhood, which appeared in a newspaper after a local murder. Despite many of his trips, McCullin also describes the impact of his work on his personality and personal life and is very honest. I photograph landscapes now. I’m not a man at peace. I still carry guilt and pain within me. Landscapes take my mind off all I’ve seen. It’s like therapy. It’s healing.

In my teenage years, I became obsessed with Vietnam war films. I devoured everyone I could come across. Big or small budgets made no difference to me. But these films were never going to entirely capture what it was like for the men and women who served out there. So I turned to the literary world in hopes of gleaming just a fraction of what it was like to have had boots on the ground. As I scoured the available information a set of photos came up time and again. With just a little digging the name Dom McCullin came up. His images of the war seemed to capture some of the true horrors of what they faced in a raw and unfiltered way that I think the general public had not really been exposed to before. A great many years later I was able to go to an exhibit of his works this time however it was of the landscape of his home county. As it turns out just a few miles away from where I live. It was fascinating to see someone's work switched to a completely different subject matter. Yet his work still had the same ability to make you stop and just stare as if held by some unseen force.

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From the early 1980s increasingly he focused his foreign adventures on more peaceful matters. He travelled extensively through Indonesia, India and Africa returning with powerful essays on places and people that, in some cases, had few if any previous encounters with the Western world. In 2010 he published Southern Frontiers, a dark and at-times menacing record of the Roman Empire's legacy in North Africa and the Middle East.

Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin: 7 October 2011 – 15 April 2012" Imperial War Museum. Accessed 2 May 2018.McCullin was born in St Pancras, London, [1] and grew up in Finsbury Park, but he was evacuated to a farm in Somerset during the Blitz. [2] He has mild dyslexia [3] [4] but displayed a talent for drawing at the secondary modern school he attended. He won a scholarship to Hammersmith School of Arts and Crafts [4] but, following the death of his father, he left school at the age of 15, without qualifications, for a catering job on the railways. [3] [4] He was then called up for National Service with the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1953. [5] Photojournalism [ edit ] Photojournalism is dead. We’ve become obsessed with glamour and gloss: footballers, narcissism and gossip. Nobody wants the pictures I used to take.