A Glimpse of Don McCullin
I hadn’t expected to come across Don McCullin on a farm in Somerset. I was on holiday to escape from things; nothing in particular, just the responsibility and concomitant stress of the everyday. Ordinary pain.
McCullin seemed to come looking for me. Here I was, visiting a farm shop, part of the newly reconverted farmstead. I was browsing through organic chicory, admiring swarthy chard and intricately iced Easter biscuits.
Turning away, the sign for the photographic exhibition appeared. I navigated myself into it through a side door. It felt like I was in the middle of something, which was true, because the exhibition was arranged in chronological order. I’d stumbled in halfway.
That didn’t matter. The intention of the order was to demonstrate the variousness of McCullin’s travels and subject matter, but the images didn’t need that context, really.
McCullin was evacuated to Somerset during the Blitz, before launching a career in photojournalism that spanned several decades and geographies, including Berlin, Biafra, Northern Ireland, Syria, and Vietnam. The exhibition coincided with his ninetieth year.
He covered numerous conflicts, operating widely in war zones across the globe. Reflecting on his experience years later, he’d said: ''They are nightly visitors to me, those people in the photos… I swear to God that I can sometimes hear those cries.'' Here they were now. Neatly aligned in black and white on plain walls, little windows full of eyes, waiting to be looked into.
I settled closely on two.
Hessel Street, Jewish District East End, London (1962): A small boy is sitting on the street. Behind him a dirty wall scrawled with base advertising, hand-written in white paint. HEINZ TOMATO SOUP, INSTANT COFFEE and BUTTER. Recognisable keynotes of capitalism through the ages. And a tabby cat. Boy and cat are exchanging a look; a moment of mutual interest. A different kind of exchange to that solicited by the advertisements behind. It appears the cat has stopped for a moment, caught the boy’s interest, and then simply wandered on, perhaps? It might equally not be that simple. It made me wonder what it was I was really seeing.
It’s a photo, like so many other photos, which makes you think about the moments either side of it. That’s how we understand the process of living – the constant conjoining of scenes. Where one begins and the other ends is imperceptible. That’s why there’s something confronting about a photograph, capturing a moment disarticulated from that wider context. You realise there’s a sort of unity to be found in an image which we can’t attain in reality. We can’t register our days as a freeze frame, each one loaded with conscious, existential import, or we’d never get going. That’s what poetry and photography are for.
McCullin captures the blunt force of the everyday. He reminded me that photographs have the potential to tell the truth – or a truth. But it’s not the truth we imagine when we stare at an image. Part of that truth might be that reality, as we experience it, causes us to miss things. Looking at a photo might enable us to shore up some of that lost import. It also reminds us what we can’t know about the subject matter of a scene.
A Lebanese Family Leaving the Martyrs Cemetery, Beirut (1982): Three men, two women. I imagine them to be relatives. The men in loose fitting shirts, holding the women, who appear distraught. One is looking ahead, an expression of anguish on her face and her hands flailing. The other woman, older, bowed in a kind of submission. She stares at the ground, but she also prays. Grief-stricken. One man looks into the camera. He is old and his expression is implacable. The white sky is behind them; a pall, pierced by trees.
When McCullin’s subjects are looking into the camera it's hard to tell what they’re thinking. Or rather, it reminds me that I can’t know what they’re feeling. It’s easier to project your own assumptions onto a downcast head than the world that exists behind a pair of eyes. It becomes difficult to decipher your own feelings at that point. Strange how the visual prerogative of photography can highlight the illegibility things, viewer included.
Susan Sonntag, in her essay ‘The Heroism of Vision’ said that a photograph can never entirely transcend its subject matter, or indeed the visual itself. I think that’s true. But McCullin’s work is certainly transcendent in its ability to demonstrate the consequences of terrible things. The taught lines of the bloated stomachs of African children during famine; the devastated remnants of a bombed Berlin; mourners mourning.
There is a mirror being held up to us by exhibitions like this. We cannot see without understanding the implications of seeing without noticing; noticing how this reflects us; noticing that the world of war, deprivation and suffering is not a figment of a distant past, but a present reality.
I believe galleries and exhibitions often tell us as much about present-day anxieties as they do about the past. We shouldn’t, I think, shy away from that. We are interested in what we are interested in for a reason. I saw in McCullin’s work a visual proxy for the stirrings of apprehension and dread which are collectively felt now.
The juxtaposition of the photographs in proximity to a farm shop flooded with over-priced items and tourists was incongruous; but it also raised a question about arbitrariness. It might be easy to leave a gallery full of photos like that, and head back to the over-priced chicory like nothing happened. But as I wrote this a notification flashed up on my watch from a news broadcaster: UK to send more troops and air defence systems to Gulf Nations. The recognisability of lives and times which we’d like to think are nothing like our own looms large.
