Don McCullin’s Post-Empire England

The National Gallery of Canada is currently exhibiting a major retrospective of compelling black and white photographs created by Don McCullin of Somerset, England.
Don McCullin’s Post-Empire England
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The National Gallery of Canada is currently exhibiting a major retrospective of compelling black and white photographs created by Don McCullin of Somerset, England.

Some might call this gifted photojournalist a war photographer but that would be inaccurate. Simply put, McCullin, who was born in 1935 in North London, is an artist.

“McMullin`s photographs belong in an art gallery because they consistently bring clarity and compositional grace to their compelling subject matter. These pictures are both hard to look at and hard not to,” said NGC director and CEO Marc Meyer.

His work is celebrated internationally. Most viewers of “Don McCullin: A Retrospective” will sense an aura of spirituality, very evident to me in photos of homeless men sleeping while standing up in East London, and in his Finsbury Park images.

Writing in the NGC’s magazine, Katherine Stauble, Sobey Curatorial Assistant, Photographs, described the most recent photos in the exhibit as “Turneresque views of the Somerset wetlands.”

McCullin himself said he thinks of his photographs as the “landscape of Arthurian myth.”

His impassioned photographs of England after the Second World War convey the air of desperation that prevailed in his homeland at the time—and a touching humanity that all but the most jaded will feel.