Don McCullin

McCullin had just returned from covering the bitter fighting during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and was the most hardened photojournalist in the field. He was astonished by the invitation. On Sunday 28 September he met the Beatles at the Sunday Times studio and began to photograph them in colour for a "Life" magazine cover...

"Don McCullin's view of England is rooted in his war time childhood and in growing up in Finsbury Park, north London, in the fifties. His first published photograph was a picture of a gang from his neighbourhood, which appeared in a newspaper after a local murder. The boys were his childhood friends. McCullin has always balanced his anger at the unacceptable face of the nation with tenderness or compassion. In England combines some of his greatest work with many previously unpublished photographs and an entirely new body of pictures." "McCullin sees in his native country a perpetual social gulf dividing the affluent and the destitute. He continues in the same black-and-white tradition as he demonstrated between foreign assignments for the Sunday Times in the sixties and seventies, when his view of a deprived Britain seemed as dark as the conflict zones from which he'd just escaped. At a time when we might believe the world has changed beyond our imagination, McCullin shows us a view of England where the line between the wealthy and the poor is as defined as ever. This time he adds wry humour to his lyricism, as if the nation is as absurd as it is tragic. At the heart of it all is McCullin's deep love of the English landscape. He transforms his views of the hills and fields of Somerset beneath dark, raging skies into the battlefields of his imagination. It is here he feels completely at home."--BOOK JACKET.

Sucedió en un día: el encuentro entre dos mitos, Don McCullin, recién llegado de Vietnam, y Los Beatles. En el verano de 1968, los Beatles, en el punto más alto de su fama internacional tras haber

Depuis soixante-cinq ans, Don McCullin photographie les effrois de notre monde. Il en capture l'actualité, les mutations, les violences mais aussi les paysages et les bouleversements sociétaux. En imposant un style tres personnel, entre "obscurite et terreur", livrant des images noires, tragiques mais eloignees des effets faciles, il est considere comme un des plus importants photographes de notre temps. McCullin etablit sa reputation en photographiant au plus pres les grands conflits de la deuxieme moitie du XXe siecle : Vietnam, Chypre, Biafra, Afrique centrale, Irlande du Nord, Liban, etc. Ce grand-oeuvre se double d'un autre, qui l'anime depuis un demi-siecle : cerner les fractures identitaires et sociales dans sa Grande-Bretagne natale, les quartiers defavorises de Londres, la desindustrialisation, les sans-abris, les laisses-pour-compte des annees Thatcher, les recales de la mondialisation... Enfin, McCullin est un paysagiste hors pair, tant de la campagne anglaise, qu'il transforme la encore en champ de bataille, que des ruines suppliciees de Palmyre, en Syrie. Alain Frachon et Michel Guerrin ont longuement rencontre ce personnage hors du commun dans sa maison du Somerset, afin de retracer les meandres d'une vie et d'une oeuvre, d'un journaliste et d'un artiste, d'un ecrivain de l'image et de notre grande histoire.

Depuis soixante-cinq ans, Don McCullin photographie les effrois de notre monde. Il en capture l’actualité, les mutations, les violences mais aussi les paysages et les bouleversements sociétaux. En im

No other photographer in modern times has recorded war and its aftermath as widely and unsparingly as Don McCullin. After a childhood in London during the Blitz, and after the hardships of evacuation, McCullin feels his life has indeed been shaped by war.From the building of the Berlin Wall at the height of the Cold War to El Salvador and Kurdistan, McCullin has covered the major conflicts of the last fifty years, with the notable exception of the Falklands, for which he was denied access. His pictures from the Citadel in Hue and in the ruins of Beirut are among the most unflinching records of modern war. The publication of many of his greatest stories in the Sunday Times magazine did much to raise the consciousness of a generation, even if he himself now fears that photographs cannot prevent history from repeating itself. The brutality of conflict returns over and over again. McCullin here voices his despair.McCullin recounts the course of his professional life in a series of devastating texts on war, the events and the power of photography. The conclusion of the book marks McCullins retreat to the Somerset landscape surrounding his home, where the dark skies over England remind him yet again of images of war. Despite the sense of belonging and even contentment, for him there is no final escape.

He has known all forms of fear, hes an expert in it. He has come back from God knows how many brinks, all different. His experience in a Ugandan prison alone would be enough to unhinge another man - like myself, as a matter of fact - for good. He has been forfeit more times than he can remember, he says. But he is not bragging. Talking this way about death and risk, he seems to be implying quite consciously that by testing his luck each time, he is testing his Makers indulgence - John le CarreMcCullin is required reading if you want to know what real journalism is all about - The TimesFrom the opening...there is hardly a dull sentence: his prose is so lively and uninhibited... An excellent book - Sunday TelegraphUnsparing reminiscences that effectively combine the bittersweet life of a world-class photojournalist with a generous selection of his haunting lifework... A genuinely affecting memoir that reckons the cost and loss involved in making ones way on the cutting edge of conflict - Kirkus ReviewsIf this was just a book of McCullins war photographs it would be valuable enough. But it is much more - Sunday Correspondent