ANNA HUIX BROOKS AND MCCULLINas hyperrealist or photorealist; Don as
war photographer. They don’t want to
be straightjacketed thus.
“War photographer: it’s like saying
I work in an abattoir,” says Don, while
Brooks points out that hyperrealism is
what happened in the 1970s when artists
turned their attention on mundane
everyday objects and gave them iconic
status: “The artistic dynamic, for me,
is the potential to be part of the wider
conversation, and that conversation is
art history.”
Over the years, the acquaintanceship
between these two solitary creative
individualists has grown into the most
unlikely and gentle of bromances. They
continue to commiserate with each other
about being hitched to women whose
work constantly takes them abroad, “and
what about all those high heels we trip
over at night, and the towels we have to
pick up o the
oor?” jokes Don. They
are indeed both neat freaks, and despite
all macho appearances (Jason calls Don
the Doc Savage of the photographic
world), they share a penchant for scented
candles, ne linen and a well-made bed
in the morning.
“It’s nice to have a friend who is an
artist with whom I can share creative
horizons,” Don condes. “I understand
the excitement he has about going into
his studio every day, not knowing where
the artistic process is going to take him
next. I admire the achiever in him and the
single-minded dedication to his work.
Jason is fastidious, immaculately turned
out as a person, and you could eat off
the
oor of his studio—that personality
comes out in the extraordinarily careful
clarity and complex luminous detail of
his painting.”
Meanwhile, Brooks laughs aside the
curmudgeonly tendencies of his friend:
“There is sensitivity and humanity,
laughter and a sense of fun: Don shows us
the world in its truest form, he is a total life
force, and his work is testament to that.”
See Jason Brooks’ work at the Van Gogh
Museum, Amsterdam, in an exhibition
dedicated to his landscapes, October 17
to January 2020, and at the Marlborough
Gallery, New York, May – June, 2020.
Don McCullin’s photographs are on view
at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, New
York, until November 16; at Hauser &
Wirth, Somerset, January 25 – May 3,
2020, and at Tate Liverpool, June 5 to
September 27, 2020.what I really look like? Has my work done
this to me, battered me so?”
The same un
inching eye, the sense
of darkness visible, of course, deines
Don’s own famous pictures of shell-
shocked marines in Vietnam, homeless
men and women in Whitechapel or
Spitalields (the most famous being
the homeless Irishman, or “Neptune”,
which has mistakenly been taken as
a McCullin self-portrait, before he
“scrubs up”). But, however much Don
is influenced by the artists whom he
most admires—Caravaggio, Goya (the
resonance and similarities between
the two was the subject of a recent
Christie’s debate)—and despite the fact
that he describes the homeless series of
portraits as his Hogarthian period, he
nevertheless insists that if these images
have become timeless icons in some
way, then this is purely accidental. He
may be “Goya with a camera”, to borrow
Cartier-Bresson’s phrase—the visceral
rawness of the image, the intensityof the direct gaze demanding urgent
engagement from the viewer—but the
intention is not art.
“As a documentary photographer of
war and con
ict, and of the street, you’re
there to catch a
eeting moment, make
an immediate statement, and there is
no second chance,” Don says. “Your
function is to bear witness to people’s
suering. Jason, as an artist, has greater
license, greater freedom. His works are
his own interpretation of the world as he
sees it, developed over months, and he
doesn’t have to walk the moral tightrope.
I put myself in these desperate situations
and I cannot be emotionally neutral as
an artist can. It has to be unflinching.
Brie
y, there’s an exchange between me
and the subject, a
are of recognition, an
exchange of trust.”
Both Jason and Don resist the labels
that the media has tried to impose
on them, labels that somehow deny
their roving romantic curiosity and
complicated sense of purpose: BrooksVANITY FAIR ON ARTBOTHJASONANDDONRESIST
THELABELSTHATTHEMEDIA
HASTRIEDTOIMPOSEONTHEM
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