Life, Death and Everything in Between

Don McCullin (b. 1935) grew up in Finsbury Park. 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 he 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. He has worked for major British newspapers during some of the most violent conflicts of the late twentieth-century. He showed war as it really was throughout his career and time spent in Biafra, Bangladesh, Lebanon and the so-called ‘troubles’ in 1970s Northern Ireland. Despite vowing to stop photographing conflict in 1979, he continued, periodically, documenting the Kurds in Iraq in the early 90s, the second Iraq War in 2003, and more recently, Syria. In addition, he has produced an elegiac body of work for over forty years of the British landscape.