24 13 April 2019 I http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk I subscribe 0330 333 1113
‘Thisistheultimate
exhibition.It’sa great
thingthattheTate
hasdone,todisplay
photojournalismin
sucha venue’
TOM STODDART
The reason that I’ve chosen this image is
because it demonstrates the extreme courage
that Don had when he was working, especially
during the Vietnam War. he has many wonderful
pictures, but this image shows how close he was
working to the front line - he’s actually right in
among the fighting. It’s not very often you see a
picture like that.
McCullin has been an inspiration to me and
many other photographers for many years, and
he was one of the reasons that I wanted to work
for The Sunday Times. I did get to work for The
Sunday Times, but unfortunately he’d left by the
time I got there.The first time I met him was in 1982, in West
Beirut. I was there covering the war in West
Beirut when the Israelis were trying to bomb
Yasser arafat’s headquarters. Don was in the Le
Commodore hotel – the war hotel if you like,
where all the journalists stayed. Don was sitting at
the bar and he was at the height of his powers.
he’d just shot an amazing set of pictures at a
hospital where there were about 15 mentally
handicapped children who were tied to the beds
during the fighting – the pictures had run in The
Sunday Times. I managed to get to talk to him -
he was very relaxed because he’d already shot
this amazing story, and he generously invited meaudiences from lots of different
countries, backgrounds and
ages, is a really wonderful thing.
From the art angle, I think that
even Don would acknowledge that
there’s a certain artistry to his work
that can’t necessarily be learned.
Susan Sontag says that in this
moment when we’re completely
bombarded with the ubiquitous
flow of news footage and television
and colour pictures in magazines,
actually the black & white
photograph offers space for
reflection and thought, and I think
that’s something that’s offered in
this exhibition. It means you take
that time to stop and look and think
- and then those images haunt you.
I think going back to that kind
of formal clarity, and even that
uncomfortable beauty, that
encourages the viewer to linger
a little bit longer, means that the
content, and the atrocities that
are going on in these images are
embedded in the viewer’s memory.
It’s that kind of artful angle to the
way that Don approaches his work
and prints his work, that means
that it should fit in among lots of the
other photography that we have at
Tate Br it a in.
AD: What has been the reaction
to the exhibition so far?
AM: I wasn’t expecting it to be quite
as popular as it has been. I think it’s
done something like 285% of the
projected visitors that we were
expecting. There’s so much of Don’s
work that appeals to so many
different people – you’re looking at
60 years of history and 60 years of
the history of photography. There
are many different audiences who
are attracted to his work for many
different reasons – people relate to
so many of the various conflicts. We
have people who come in who are
Northern Irish, people who are
Lebanese, or Cypriot, and there
are all of those collections, and the
secondary collections that
relate back to that. But also he
don Mccullin
Right: Grenade Thrower,
Hue, Vietnam, 1968