In England
By Don McCullin
2007
First Published
4.30
Average Rating
252
Number of Pages
Don McCullin’s view of England is rooted in two worlds—his wartime childhood, and his youth in 1950s Finsbury Park. His first published photograph was a picture of a gang from his neighborhood, which appeared in a newspaper after a local murder. McCullin always balanced his anger at the unacceptable face of the nation with tenderness or compassion, and in this collection, he envisions his home country with its perpetual social gulf between the affluent and the desperate in mind. He continues in the same black and white tradition as he did between foreign assignments for the Sunday Times in the 1960s and 1970s, when his view of a deprived Britain seemed as dark as the conflict zones from which he had just escaped. This book marks his return to the cities and landscape he knew as a young photographer, adding wry humor to his famed lyricism. At a time when we might believe the world has changed beyond our imagination, McCullin shows us a view of England where the line between the wealthy and the impoverished is as defined as ever, the nation as a whole as absurd as it is tragic.
Avg Rating
4.30
Number of Ratings
33
5 STARS
55%
4 STARS
30%
3 STARS
9%
2 STARS
3%
1 STARS
3%
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Author
Don McCullin
Author · 11 books
Don McCullin grew up in north London and was evacuated in 1940 to Somerset. He failed the eleven-plus examination and went to Tollington Park Secondary Modern School. He won a trade art scholarship to the Hammersmith School of Arts and Crafts and Buildings. His father, who was an invalid, died, aged forty and McCullin was forced to find work to earn money for the family. He became a pantry boy on the London, Midland and Scottish Railway dining cars, travelling between London and Manchester. In 1950 he went to work in a cartoon animation studio in Mayfair before the Observer newspaper bought one of his gangland pictures and set him on the road as a photojournalist. He moved to the Sunday Times, where he worked for eighteen years. His photographs of almost every major conflict in his adult lifetime until the Falklands war provide some of the most potent images of the twentieth century. His pictures are in major museum collections all over the world. He is the holder of many honours and awards, including the C.B.E. His home is in a Somerset village.
