CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/21/2015

Don McCullin

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."