Donald McCullin, FRPS CBE (born 9 October 1935, Finsbury Park, London, England) is an internationally known British photojournalist, particularly recognised for his war photography and images of urban strife. His career, which began in 1959, has specialised in examining the underside of society, and his photographs have depicted the unemployed, downtrodden and the impoverished.
McCullin's period of National Service in the RAF saw him posted to the Canal Zone during the 1956 Suez Crisis, where he worked as a photographer's assistant. He failed to pass the written theory paper necessary to become a photographer in the RAF, and so spent his service in the darkroom.
In 1959, a photograph he took of a local London gang was published in The Observer. Between 1966 and 1984, he worked as an overseas correspondent for the Sunday Times Magazine, recording ecological and man-made catastrophes such as war-zones, amongst them Biafra, in 1968 and victims of the African AIDS epidemic. His hard-hitting coverage of the Vietnam War and the Northern Ireland conflict is particularly highly regarded.
In 1982 the British Government refused to grant McCullin a press pass to cover the Falklands War.
At the time he believed it was because the Thatcher government felt his images might be too disturbing politically, however it recently emerged that he was a victim of bureaucracy: he had been turned away simply because the Royal Navy had used up its quota of press passes.
In 1968, his Nikon camera stopped a bullet intended for him.
He is the author of a number of books, including The Palestinians (with Jonathan Dimbleby, 1980), Beirut: A City in Crisis (1983), and Don McCullin in Africa (2005). His book, Shaped by War (2010), was published to accompany a major retrospective exhibition at the Imperial War Museum North, Salford, England running from February to June 2010. The most recent title from McCullin is "Southern Frontiers: A Journey Across the Roman Empire", a poetic and contemplative study of selected Roman and pre-Roman ruins in North Africa and the Middle East.
Selected awards
McCullin received the World Press Photo Award in 1964 for his coverage of the war in Cyprus. In the same year he was awarded the Warsaw Gold Medal. In 1977, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, placing the letters 'FRPS' after his name. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Bradford in 1993 and an honorary degree by the Open University in 1994.
He was granted the CBE in 1993, the first photojournalist to receive the honour.
McCullin was awarded the Cornell Capa Award in 2006.
On 4 December 2008, McCullin was conferred with an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Gloucestershire in recognition of his lifetime's achievement in photojournalism.
In later years, McCullin has turned to landscape and still-life works and taking commissioned portraits. Currently living in Somerset, he is married and has five children from this and earlier marriages.
"I grew up in total ignorance, poverty and bigotry, and this has been a burden for me throughout my life. There is still some poison that won't go away, as much as I try to drive it out."
"I am a professed atheist, until I find myself in serious circumstances. Then I quickly fall on my knees, in my mind if not literally, and I say : "Please God, save me from this."
"I have been manipulated, and I have in turn manipulated others, by recording their response to suffering and misery. So there is guilt in every direction: guilt because I don't practice religion, guilt because I was able to walk away, while this man was dying of starvation or being murdered by another man with a gun. And I am tired of guilt, tired of saying to myself: "I didn't kill that man on that photograph, I didn't starve that child." That's why I want to photograph landscapes and flowers. I am sentencing myself to peace." Horvatland - Frank Horvat Photography: Entre Vues - Don McCullin
