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.