Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 05 Aug 2015

Sleeping With Ghosts: A life's work in photography by Don McCullin

In my late teens and twenties I was bewitched by photography and the legends of the great photographers. These were action artists and myths grew around them like bracken. Somewhere near the top of the pecking order were the crazy war photographers who risked life and limb to grab documentary evidence of the insanity of combat. There were actual casualties and even deaths amongst the photographers but the toll on their mental health was probably even more deep-seated. Tales of their wild acts of bravery and their whisky-soaked evenings in bars on the edge of the theatres of war all came together to make these men and their cameras anti-establishment heroes.

The main man for me at this time was Don McCullin - a man who embodied everything I then thought photography should be: confrontational, dirty, dangerous and critical. This was a pictoral politics, a testimony to man's stupidity and, at the same time, his bravery and loyalty. McCullin showed us the injustice of power, the way civilians are made into victims and what war can do to raw teenage soldiers (most of whom were younger even than I was when I saw these photographs). Myself and my friends would wait impatiently for the next Sunday Colour Supplement dedicated to the work of one of these great photographers - hard to imagine that now given the way this heritage has been lost in the vapid consumer brochures these supplements have become.small-thumbnail

Sleeping with Ghosts is a fabulous book that brings together the different phases of Don McCullin's work over the years. His war and civil disobedience photography sits alongside his work on famine and poverty. Breathtaking and heartbreaking. When the taste of war got too much even for McCullin, he turned his lens on his home country and showed us the streets of our home towns, often populated with the poor and the eccentric.

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Jonathan Cape have done a fine job of selecting and presenting this tour through McCullin's work. It's not definitive of course - he continues to take more academic photographs, still lives and portraits. But for me, this collection is indispensible and not only captures the world of McCullin but reminds me of why I was so passionate about photography in my earlier days and why I still believe in it as a weapon of social discourse.small-thumbnail

The book shown here was published by Jonathan Cape in 1994

Terry Potter

August 2015

 

 

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