Don McCullin (b. 1935) grew up in Finsbury Park, and his early photographs reflect the people and places that he knew well. He began taking photographs during his military service and brought his camera back with him to the UK, beginning what would be a life-long commitment to photography. In 1961 McCullin travelled to Berlin just as the wall was being installed and built, and his resulting photographs earned him a contract with The Observer newspaper and his first Press Award. McCullin is recognised internationally as one of the greatest war photographers having worked for major British newspapers during some of the most violent conflicts of the late twentieth-century. His work in Vietnam cemented his reputation for both bravery and compassion. The moral imperative to show war as it really was continued throughout his career and time spent in Biafra, Bangladesh, Lebanon and the so-called 'troubles' in 1970s Northern Ireland. Despite vowing to stop photographing wars and conflict in 1979, McCullin continued, periodically, to return to action, documenting the repression of the Kurds in Iraq in the early 90s, the second Iraq War in 2003, and even more recently, Syria. For most of his career McCullin has embarked on personal projects, many of which focused on working class communities in the north of England, or the unhoused in London. He has also maintained relationships with parts of the world outside his practice as a war photographer--in particular India, Southern Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan. In addition, McCullin has produced landscape photographs for over forty years, developing an elegiac vision of the British landscape. Recently, McCullin embarked on what he considers his final epic project, a cultural and architectural survey of the remains of the Roman Empire in the southern Mediterranean.
