Don McCullin | Photography review (original) (raw)

It feels like a state honour: the photojournalist Don ­McCullin, one-time employee of the ­Observer and the Sunday Times, is ­being dignified with a retrospective at a ­national museum. The venue – the new Libeskind-designed ­Imperial War ­Museum North – tells you the emphasis is on his astonishing ­combat work.

There's a pleasingly ­biographical feel to the exhibition, even if it's strictly about greatest hits, rather than a ­comprehensive presentation of his work. It takes in McCullin's origins in the hardscrabble north London ­district of Finsbury Park (memorialised ­brilliantly in his first published picture, in the Observer in 1959, of his teen-gang compadres, the Guvnors); a honeymoon trip to Berlin as the wall was going up in 1961; then proper war photography in Cyprus, Vietnam, Biafra, Northern ­Ireland, Cambodia, El Salvador.

McCullin was largely untutored in photography, which makes his ­ability to wring a handful of stupendous images from everywhere he went even more admirable. Time and ­familiarity have not dulled their power: the ­Cartier-Bressonesque shot of a Cypriot ­militiaman running alongside a cinema; a grenade-thrower in Vietnam; malnourished children during the Biafran war. Through these images, you get a distillation of the hottest areas of the cold war.

Documentation on display reveals McCullin's clashes with the Sunday Times as its magazine grew more ­consumerist in the early 1980s – but more than ­anything, the exhibition is an insight into a ­photographer who was first seduced and then traumatised by the barbarities he witnessed. McCullin now spends his time photographing English landscapes and classical ruins. The man has earned his rest.