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A man shaped by war - The Open College of the Arts

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A man shaped by war thumb

A man shaped by war

Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum

 
Don McCullin once gave me a valuable lesson. Yes, I’ve met the man, not in a far-flung war zone but in the safety of a lecture hall. I was responsible for introducing him to the audience and for operating the audiovisual equipment. As soon as he arrived, well before the talk started, McCullin handed me the photographs he was intended to show. 
 ̶ “Only 20 slides Mr. McCullin?” I said foolishly as I looked at a single plastic slide storage sleeve containing 20 dusty B&W slides.    
 ̶ “Yes, that’ll be enough”, he confidently replied.
  “That’ll be enough”. Great, I thought, the talk will be over in 30min and we’ll have a full-house of disappointed punters. 
Far from being over in 30min, with those 20 images McCullin kept the audience captivated for nearly two and a half hours. Every slide came alive with touching human stories, his and those of the people he photographed. Each photograph was a vast container of memories which he was sharing with the audience. I felt I was part of what was being shown on the screen. That was the lesson Don McCullin taught me. 
And when I visited his latest exhibition, Shaped by War, presented by the Imperial War Museum at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath, I had exactly that same feeling again. 
Shaped by War is a retrospective of McCullin’s work showing some of his most widely published work. His hand-printed B&W photographs are accompanied by McCullin’s harrowing commentaries on audio guides. Cabinets containing mementos collected by McCullin over decades working as a war photographer, including his bullet-hit Nikon F, add a personal touch to the exhibition. Here is a photographer who has always known why he was taking photographs. “I want you look at my photographs…and go away with a conscience obligation”. 
Between his early work in Finsbury Park and Birmingham in the 50’s and 60’s and his latest landscapes, the exhibition display is not unlike a visual history book on the armed conflicts of the second half of the 20th century. How many wars can one person endure before losing their mind? How much grief can someone cope with? The Cyprus Civil War, Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon, El Salvador. And as if it wasn’t enough with war he also covered humanitarian disasters such as Biafra and the typhoid epidemics following East Asian monsoons. I’m not surprised that for the last two decades he has found solace in landscape photography. “it is like meditation” he admits, “it helps the healing…”. But his battle wounds are still there, very much open it seems. Even his landscapes have a somber quality to them; apparently, he prefers to take photographs during the winter season. 
The exhibition includes award-winning images such as the photograph of the Turkish Cypriot woman mourning the death of her husband. What you see in this image is pure and simply irreducible grief, a rock-bottom level of pain which invades you when you look at it. Or the photograph of the Albino Boy from Biafra, a ghostly figure that “when you are alone in the darkroom, printing it…comes back and says hello, hello…”, admits McCullin. The shell-shocked American soldier in Vietnam is also there, clutching his rifle, his eyes hardly visible in the shadow of his own helmet, blind as it were to the rest of the world. 
Yes, McCullin is a tormented man I reckon, and you wouldn’t blame him for it if you read his autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour. “Why should I stand in from of them and photograph their pain?” On his 75th birthday McCullin still asks himself this question.  This powerful exhibition is a reminder that there is no easy answer.
You can listen to Don McCullin talking about his exhibition on BBC 4 Excess Baggage  (iPlayer).
 Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin 


Posted by author: Jose

3 thoughts on “A man shaped by war

  • Your description ‘Each photograph was a vast container of memories which he was sharing’ made me think of an exhibition in Somerset Arts Week, ‘Hut 27’ by Jon England and Edward Milligan, which focus was Ted’s experience as a POW in WW2 in the form of a body of work, drawings, made at the time, along with corresponding diary entries. The day I visited Ted was there, he too was like a vast container of memories and he was happy to share them. The experience had a big impact on me, so the above description has made me want to visit this exhibition too.

  • I think it is all too easy to forget that the images we see are subject to sifting by editors who are thinking about our sensibilities. The war photographer sees it without that safety net. I think that McCullin’s question must face every war photographer. This slideshow is well worth a watch, but I should warn it is not a pleasant viewing experience

  • I’ll second Jose’s recommendation for ‘unreasonable behaviour’. One of those books its hard to put down after reading the first few pages.
    Id just finished watching that link that Gareth supplied just before receiving the OCA email.
    For anyone interested in Don McCullin, the BBC still have a number of audio and slideshow interviews on its site, just google BBC Don McCullin (noteably the John McCarthy on radio4 and the today audio slideshow).
    Joe

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