The Impossible Peace
Don McCullin
Contact Press Images
Winner of the 2013 Figaro Magazine Lifetime Achievement Visa d’or Award
Art historians will no doubt say that Don McCullin is to photography what Goya is to painting, but the legendary British photographer is far more than that. He chose to experience war, initially through a spirit of adventure, as a challenge; but before long, it was anger and an abhorrence of war; it was to expose war and speak out against the war that he could see there in the eyes of the human beings trapped in the midst of the fearful torment that destroyed both their bodies and lives, that crushed any hope.
This terrifying experience left its scars. It was the intensity in the eyes looking at him that drove him on, making him go back again, and yet again. Those eyes, their intensity, stand as proof of the power photography to be part of the record of time.
But war has not gone away; it has never stopped thundering and echoing, showing that images are tragically powerless and unable to stop it.
This is the ultimate despair of the photographer. Don McCullin admitted his distress and weariness; he saw that ultimately his efforts and commitment had served no purpose. He then endeavored to find peace, for himself, in the countryside of England, his homeland.
Yet once again he could not escape madness: wars and landscapes clash to the point of merging; clouds become mirrors reflecting tragedies; the damp skies and sodden earth conjure up images of muddy mass graves. There are pictures there within him, etched deeply in his view which grasps the view of others, of all the others he has encountered, confronting death.
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To quote Harold Evans, former editor of The Sunday Times: “He has known all their emotions. He is one of them in their common humanity, and that in the end is what marks McCullin, a person in search of something that is mysterious in his own life but profound in his pictures.”*
Don McCullin explains that the exhibition begins in post-War England, goes on to the building of the Berlin wall in 1961, the scourge of AIDS in southern Africa, and, at the turn of the 21st century, the merciless battle waged against the human race by disease, poverty and injustice. His path has been filled with increasingly violent conflicts: Cyprus (1964), the Congo (1966), ongoing battles in the Middle East, plus Biafra (1968), Bangladesh (1971) and Northern Ireland (1971) – and many reports in between on the Vietnam War and the subsequent events in Cambodia (1964-1975).
His path has also been marked by the landscapes of Somerset, the banks of the Ganges, then later by southern Ethiopia, as well as Roman ruins in the Mediterranean region, and, most recently, by the Nubian pyramids in Sudan.
We obviously share in the total admiration expressed by Susan Sontag for the heroic path McCullin has traced through regions marked by horror and suffering: "In this great tradition of photojournalism, sometimes labeled 'concerned photography' or 'the photography of conscience,' no one has surpassed – in breadth, in directness, in intimacy, in unforgettability – the gut-wrenching work produced by Don McCullin." *
Robert Pledge, Director, Contact Press Images
*In Don McCullin, published by Jonathan Cape and MEP, 2001
Exhibition supported by* Paris Match*.
