McCullin
– a war junkie by his own admission. Survived Biafra, Vietnam, Lebanon,
Northern Ireland. I’ve followed his work since I became interested in
photography as a teenager. But with Don McCullin, you can’t just be interested,
you immerse yourself in his images. I’d read ‘Unreasonable Behaviour’ – an account
of his experiences as a Sunday Times photojournalist. I own a book of his
photographs. But nothing could have prepared me for the film.
The
camera lingers on his shots for longer than I could look. It forced me to
confront the images. You can no longer marvel at the composition, his composure
in taking the pictures amid chaos in the complete sense of the word. You are
confronted by the Albino boy in Biafra clutching an empty can of corn beef. And
you are confronted by McCullin’s words recounting how the children’s anuses
were hanging out of their bodies. How they could hardly crawl, that they were
basically dying before his eyes. And in Lebanon – in a mental institution for
children – they couldn’t leave and the staff had been forced to lock some of
the children up – so that they were swimming in their own faeces. Another image
of the Christian falangists in Lebanon, saw them triumphantly celebrating with
a lute over a dead body of a Muslim woman.
The
relentless truth of these images, the relentless truth of McCullin himself is
simply too much. The world is too much. This is a man who is haunted, and you
see it in his face. He says he is not plagued by nightmares, but images and
sounds plague him in the day. When his mind can’t escape his unremitting
thoughts. His landscape photographs of Somerset seem to be inhabited by the ghosts of war. They
are beautiful but bleak. McCullin recently returned to war – to Syria. He’s 77.
