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APERTURE
Don McCullin
Text by Mark Holborn, Harold Evans, Susan Sontag.
First published in 2001, this retrospective survey offers both an examination of Don McCullin's photographic career as well as a record of half a century of international conflict. Coinciding with the photographer's eightieth birthday, this expanded edition of Don McCullin serves as fitting homage to a photographer who dedicated his life to the front line in order to deliver compassionate visual testament to human suffering. With texts by Mark Holborn, Harold Evans and Susan Sontag, and photographs taken by McCullin in England, Cyprus, Vietnam, the Congo, Biafra, Northern Ireland, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Beirut, this is an essential volume on one of the legendary photographers of the 20th century. "I have long admired Don McCullin's heroic journey through some of the most appalling zones of suffering in the last third of the 20th century," Sontag wrote in her essay. "We now have a vast repository of images that make it harder to preserve such moral defectiveness. Let the atrocious images haunt us … Seeing reality in the form of an image cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers." British photographer Don McCullin (born 1935) began his professional photographic career in 1959, and dedicated himself to photographing war, conflict, disease and poverty around the world, turning in his later years to landscape and still-life photography in his native England.
In the great tradition of photojournalism, Susan Sontag wrote, "no one has surpassed—in breadth, in directness, in intimacy, in unforgettability—the exemplary, gut-wrenching work produced by Don McCullin. There can be no doubt of the intentions of this tenacious, impassioned witness, bringing back his news from hell. He wants to sadden. He means to arouse… We actually understand very little by just looking at the photographic witness of some heartbreaking arena of indignity, pain and death. Seeing reality in the form of an image cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. There are questions to be asked. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we’ve accepted up to now that ought to be challenged? A photograph can’t coerce. It won’t do the moral work for us. But it can start us on the way." Featured image is captioned, "Dying U.S. Marine carried by tank through the ruins of the Citadel, Hue, 1968." continue to blog
In his introduction to Aperture's gorgeous new edition of the photojournalistic monograph Don McCullin (one of our top holiday gift books of 2015), editor Mark Holborn writes, "McCullin has described his beginnings bluntly, ‘I am a product of Hitler. I was born in the thirties and bombed in the forties’. Apart from occasional foreign travel, he now lives his days quietly in a Somerset village, where he photographs the landscape and arranges still-lifes. His home is a long way from the war-scarred North London of Holloway Road or the Caledonian Market where all this began. He continues to work obsessively. Rain and cloud don’t trouble him. He now counts every day as a blessing. He favors ominous skies. He loves shafts of light breaking the clouds. They remind him of biblical engravings — Gustav Doré weather. When you look at his stark pictures of the Somerset Levels, you sense how strongly his memory of the battlefield lingers. However, to describe him as a combat photographer would be false. He is simply a great photographer, and though it was never his intention, it is now emphatically clear that he is as an artist. Fourteen years have made this fact all the more explicit." Featured image is "Sunday morning, Chapel Market, Islington, London, 1962." continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 11.25 x 12 in. / 352 pgs / 300 duotone. LIST PRICE: U.S. $75.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $90 ISBN: 9781597113427 PUBLISHER: Aperture AVAILABLE: 8/25/2015 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: No longer our product AVAILABILITY: Not Available
Published by Aperture. Text by Mark Holborn, Harold Evans, Susan Sontag.
First published in 2001, this retrospective survey offers both an examination of Don McCullin's photographic career as well as a record of half a century of international conflict. Coinciding with the photographer's eightieth birthday, this expanded edition of Don McCullin serves as fitting homage to a photographer who dedicated his life to the front line in order to deliver compassionate visual testament to human suffering. With texts by Mark Holborn, Harold Evans and Susan Sontag, and photographs taken by McCullin in England, Cyprus, Vietnam, the Congo, Biafra, Northern Ireland, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Beirut, this is an essential volume on one of the legendary photographers of the 20th century.
"I have long admired Don McCullin's heroic journey through some of the most appalling zones of suffering in the last third of the 20th century," Sontag wrote in her essay. "We now have a vast repository of images that make it harder to preserve such moral defectiveness. Let the atrocious images haunt us … Seeing reality in the form of an image cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers."
British photographer Don McCullin (born 1935) began his professional photographic career in 1959, and dedicated himself to photographing war, conflict, disease and poverty around the world, turning in his later years to landscape and still-life photography in his native England.
