Photographing What We Do Not See
I won’t label Don McCullin other than to say to me he’s always been a photographer. For the most part, his professional career was as a photojournalist (much of it as a freelancer for The Observer or The Sunday Times) and involved him taking a camera into conflict areas. Places where people tend to not want to be, but that the world needs to know about. Places like Cyprus, Vietnam, Cambodia, Biafra, the Congo, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Syria, Afghanistan. The titles of some of his earlier books tell a story: Is Anyone Taking Any Notice?, Hearts of Darkness: Photographs by Don McCullin, Sleeping with Ghosts. They are often not easy images to look at. He doesn’t intend them to be.
In retirement, as he put it, “I am sentencing myself to peace.” So he turned to photographing the English landscape around his home. He photographed still life images in his barn. He set out to photograph Roman ruins throughout the ancient empire. And then Roman sculptures. But, as again he puts it, he remains tormented by what he has seen and pushed himself to do. And it shows in his photographs. His landscapes are not what he calls, “chocolate box” landscapes. Instead, they are black and white images of the English countryside in winter, with gloomy cloud covered skies or of approaching storms. His still life images are a touch unnerving. His images of Rome’s Empire tell of a visibly fallen empire. Even his images of beautiful Roman sculptures are both beautiful and a touch haunting.
The reason he has resurfaced on my radar is he has just released what he says will be his final book. Not surprising given he’s in his 90’s. After all these decades, he’s gone back to his collection of negatives and just released Vietnam. He spent three periods there. His introduction to the country was what turned out to be the Tet Offensive in Hué. He thought that previous conflict zones had prepared him for that war. He admits it hadn’t. He spent time on the front lines, where you have to be to photograph it. Again as he put it, “hunkered down with the marines under sniper fire, wearing the same clothes for 12 days straight.” In a later trip back to Southeast Asia, after one of his images was published - of a wounded soldier in the back of a truck in Cambodia - the outrage hurled at him was immense. How could he take advantage of that Cambodian soldier’s suffering? Nobody bothered to ask why he was in the back of the truck with them. Both of them had been wounded by the same mortar explosion. The mortar barrage was ongoing as he made the photograph. He was eventually evacuated out of the country. But while he was in that truck, wounded himself, he was compelled to photograph the the man who could have been him. That man died on the journey to the hospital, his legs lying across McCullin’s body. That wasn’t the only time he somehow didn’t die. There was the grenade that landed between him and a marine. Again he survived, the soldier didn’t. He tells other stories that make you wonder, “How?” That was the life he lived for too many years. Time and again it was the other guy, not him. And his job was to photograph it all. Though he admits, at times he dropped being a photographer and became a human, carrying a wounded soldier on his back, helping to move the injured to safety. Then picking up his cameras again. Yes, he still has nightmares. Mostly, he says, of Hué.
Studying him now has the advantage of video taken of him talking about his work past and present. It’s the present that is, in many ways, more rewarding. He talks about his life in Somerset, his home where he loves to just walk out across the fields and photograph, of his exploration of England, to places new and old revisited. His continued love of using photography to learn about what makes England England, and what makes himself who he is. He recalls times of hardship and horror, but also of things amazing, beautiful things. And the ease at which he approaches people, of all walks of life, and starts conversations with them is, quite frankly, amazing. His curiosity seems to have no end. In one video he said, “Photography has given me not so much an education but a lifetime’s worth of experiences.” We should all be so lucky. But as he said in the same film, “I find myself bound to print images as dark as I possibly can.”
So when I look at Don McCullin’s work, depending on the subject matter, it is to bear witness of man’s inhumanity to man, to not forget what it is we do to each other. Other times, it is to respect the way a man, who has seen what we do not see and do not want to see, sees the world that I see. To learn how to look at the landscape with different eyes that have had a very different experience than me. To see the world differently. His landscape images are tonally dark. And while they are revealing of the landscape’s moods and emotion, they rarely possess the wonder and awe I often try to find when I’m out in nature. So I try to learn from them. Try to see what he sees and I don’t.
I pulled out my camera the other day, after writing last week’s post, because I saw another image. After I put my camera back upstairs, I saw another, so climbed back up the steps to grab the camera and make that image. And then I saw another, so I made it too. Three images. I decided that I should try to develop them differently than I normally would. Darker. Starker. To see if I can learn from them something different than I normally world. I don’t know if I was really successful or not, but I doubt I would have even thought of that if I hadn’t been looking at Don McCullin’s work. So, thank you Don.