Hamiltons is pleased to present Don McCullin: Eighty, an exhibition to honour both McCullin’s 80th birthday and his decades of collaboration with Hamiltons. The works displayed are representative of his diverse and extensive oeuvre. Each print in the exhibition is special for its oversized format; many of these images have never been seen before in this size. Each work is a gelatin silver print, in a limited edition of 15, printed under McCullin’s supervision. Whilst McCullin is known for printing his own pictures, for this exhibition he worked closely with trusted, specialist printers to produce these oversized works as his own dark room is not large enough to make prints of this size. The scale of these images enhances their monumentality and power.
McCullin’s knack for getting where most civilians could not contributes to the remarkable closeness he has to his subjects. His sympathies, it is clear in his pictures, lie with the victims – the poor and ordinary people, on both sides of the conflict. Perhaps the most well-known photograph to come out of The Vietnam War is his Shell Shocked Marine. McCullin recalls dropping to his knees to take the picture, taking five single, consecutive shots. In each, the marine’s expression did not change; he did not blink once.
“Sometimes it felt like I was carrying pieces of human flesh back home with me, not negatives. It's as if you are carrying the suffering of the people you have photographed.” Don McCullin
In 1981, Richard Murdoch took over The Sunday Times and as McCullin says, this was “the beginning of the end for telling truths through the medium of film.” McCullin’s work contributed significantly to anti-war feeling at the time, as readers could witness the realities of war. However, he was soon dismissed due to the replacement editor’s complaints under the new regime that the newspaper lacked serious foreign and social coverage. “We spent years photographing dying soldiers in Vietnam, and they are not going to have that anymore … you have to bear witness. You cannot just look away.”
“During the late Sixties and Seventies, my main commitment was covering the wars…By the 1970s, I started to feel detached from my own English culture and so I felt it was time that I rediscover…what became of the country to which I belong. The most shocking aspect of my discovery was the ever-widening gap between the haves and have-nots. I was most certainly stunned by the amount of poverty that still existed in my society…” Don McCullin
Don McCullin, The Guvnors in their Sunday Suits, Finsbury Park, London, 1958 © Don McCullin