First published in 2001, this retrospective survey offers both an examination of Don McCullin’s photographic career as well as a record of half a century of international conflict. Coinciding with the photographer’s eightieth birthday, this expanded edition of Don McCullin serves as fitting homage to a photographer who dedicated his life to the front line in order to deliver compassionate visual testament to human suffering. With texts by Mark Holborn, Harold Evans and Susan Sontag, and photographs taken by McCullin in England, Cyprus, Vietnam, the Congo, Biafra, Northern Ireland, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Beirut, this is an essential volume on one of the legendary photographers of the twentieth century. I have long admired Don McCullin’s heroic journey through some of the most appalling zones of suffering in the last third of the twentieth century, Sontag wrote in her essay. We now have a vast repository of images that make it harder to preserve such moral defectiveness. Let the atrocious images haunt us Seeing reality in the form of an image cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers.
