Don McCullin has lived several lives in the field of photography, many of them simultaneously. Born in 1935, he grew up in what he called “a constant roundabout of violence,” in the tough Finsbury Park area of London, leaving school (as many did) at 15. In the mid-1950s, McCullin did his national service in the Royal Air Force, where he eventually worked as a photographer’s assistant. He bought a Rolleicord camera and began focusing on what others, he later said, “cannot bear to see.”
The first pictures McCullin took were of hoodlums and down-and-outs, subjects that reflected his own hardscrabble background. He soon moved on to more violent arenas, becoming one of the 20th century’s most renowned combat photographers. Best known for his documentation of the Vietnam War, McCullin also produced work of diamond-hard brilliance and empathy from the Biafra war, Beirut, and the so-called Cyprus crisis in the 1960s.
