COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MARLBOROUGH GALLERY,
NEW YORK AND LONDON DONTHE UNFLINCHING EYE
Don McCullin and Jason Brooks
W
hen I visited the
photographer Don McCullin
in his remote Somerset
longhouse on an assignment for Harper’s
Bazaar some 18 years ago, it was his sense
of solitariness that struck. Here was a man
rattling around alone in a ve-bedroom
house to the soundtrack of hooting owls
and a distant rushing stream, trying to
come to terms with a failed marriage,
and with separation from a teenage child
(the youngest of his four) from another
relationship. He told me that he didn’t need
friends—friendship required commitment
that took him away from his work. There
was always his best man and adventuring
partner-in-crime, Mark Shand, a valley or
two away who he could call on when thesolitude became too much. He was the
only man with whom he would consider
sharing his stash of PG tips in the jungle,
his cashmere Armani coat and the details
of his heartbreaks.
Otherwise, he would blast Elgar
through the sound system for company.
He said he passed his time poring over
the images of the wars and conicts he
had witnessed over the previous half
century, foraged the hills and hedgerows
for mushrooms and blackberries, and
roamed the Somerset Levels with his
camera, waiting for ngers of sunlight
to part the cloudy skies.
His rst gift to me would be a pair of
black-and-white still lives which he had
printed in his darkroom: one depictingdisturbing, if poignant, arrangements of
horse mushrooms, a bronze Heinemann
igure and a goblet; the other a vase
of fainting tulips in an evening light,
set against the distressed wall of his
ruined lean-to. They seemed to me to
be quintessential expressions of the
loneliness of a sensitive man. So reader,
I married him.
As Don and I got to know each other,
it was a challenge to winkle him away
from his sanctuary and break his solitary
carapace. It took a lot of cajoling to get
him to enter into the spirit of the circus
of my busy London social life. So when
my editor Lucy Yeomans suggested a
dinner to introduce us to the new man
in her life, the artist Jason Brooks, DonVANITY FAIR ON ART NOVEMBER 201911-19-McCullin-Catherine-Fairweather.indd 60 13/09/2019 15:29
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