Don mccullin biography
PATHETIC FALLACY
The phrase pathetic fallacy is a literary term for the attribution of human emotion and conduct to things found in nature that are not human. It is a kind of personification that occurs in poetic descriptions, when, for example, clouds seem sullen, when leaves dance, or when rocks seem indifferent. The British cultural critic John Ruskin coined the term in his book, Modern Painters (1843–60).
PHOTOJOURNALISM
Photojournalism is a particular form of journalism (the collecting, editing, and presenting of news material for publication or broadcast) that employs images in order to tell a news story. Photojournalism is distinguished from other close branches of photography (e.g. documentary photography, social documentary photography, street photography or celebrity photography) by complying with a rigid ethical framework which demands that the work is both honest and impartial whilst telling the story in strictly journalistic terms. Photojournalists create pictures that contribute to the news media.
RENAISSANCE (FLEMISH)
The Dutch and Flemish Renaissance represents the 16th-century response to Italian Renaissance art in the Low Countries; in the 1600s still-life painting as an independent genre or specialty first flourished.
SOCIAL DOCUMENTARY
Social documentary photography involves the recording of people in their natural condition; it is a form of documentary photography. Most often it is used to show the life of underprivileged or disadvantaged people.
STILL LIFE
One of the principal genres (subject types) of Western art – essentially, the subject matter of a still life painting, sculpture or photography is anything that does not move or is dead typically commonplace objects which are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells) or man made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes).
WAR PHOTOGRAPHY
War photography involves photographing armed conflict and its effects on people and places. Photog
“Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.”
Don McCullin is one of our greatest living photographers. Few have enjoyed a career so long; none one of such variety and critical acclaim. For the past 50 years he has proved himself a photojournalist without equal, whether documenting the poverty of London’s East End, or the horrors of wars in Africa, Asia or the Middle East. Simultaneously he has proved an adroit artist capable of beautifully arranged still lifes, soulful portraits and moving landscapes.
Following an impoverished north London childhood blighted by Hitler’s bombs and the early death of his father, McCullin was called up for National Service with the RAF. After postings to Egypt, Kenya and Cyprus he returned to London armed with a twin reflex Rolleicord camera and began photographing friends from a local gang named The Guv’nors. Persuaded to show them to the picture editor at the Observer in 1959, aged 23, he earned his first commission and began his long and distinguished career in photography more by accident than design.
In 1961 he won the British Press Award for his essay on the construction of the Berlin Wall. His first taste of war came in Cyprus, 1964, where he covered the armed eruption of ethnic and nationalistic tension, winning a World Press Photo Award for his efforts. In 1993 he was the first photojournalist to be awarded a CBE.
Vietnam,1969
On a hill in Da Nang a priest hears soldiers' confessions
Biafra,1969
To already be unfortunate enough to be born an albino child in Africa is already a struggle, but to be starved to death at the same time would have been hell
Berlin,1961
Checkpoint Charlie
For the next two decades war became a mainstay of Don’s journalism, initially for the Observer and, from 1966, for The Sunday Times. In the Congo, Biafr
Don McCullin
British photojournalist
Sir Don McCullin CBE | |
|---|---|
McCullin on TV Brasil, 2011 | |
| Born | Donald McCullin (1935-10-09) 9 October 1935 (age 89) St Pancras, London, England |
| Occupation | Photojournalist |
| Years active | 1959–present |
| Spouses |
|
| Children | 5 |
Sir Donald McCullinCBE (born 9 October 1935) is a British photojournalist, particularly recognised for his war photography and images of urban strife. His career, which began in 1959, has specialised in examining the underside of society, and his photographs have depicted the unemployed, downtrodden and impoverished.
Early life
McCullin was born in St Pancras, London, and grew up in Finsbury Park, but he was evacuated to a farm in Somerset during the Blitz. He has mild dyslexia but displayed a talent for drawing at the secondary modern school he attended. He won a scholarship to Hammersmith School of Arts and Crafts but, following the death of his father, he left school at the age of 15, without qualifications, for a catering job on the railways. He was then called up for National Service with the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1953.
Photojournalism
During his National Service, McCullin was posted to the Suez Canal during the 1956 Suez Crisis, and served as a photographer's assistant. He failed the written theory paper to become a photographer in the RAF and spent his service in the darkroom. During this period McCullin bought his first camera, a Rolleicord, for £30 when stationed in Nairobi. On return to Britain, shortage of funds led to his pawning the camera Born in London, Don McCullin studied painting at the Hammersmith School of Arts and Crafts from 1948 to 1950, and worked for British Railways and as a color-mixer for Larkins Cartoon Studios before entering the military. There he was an assistant in aerial reconnaissance photography. Three years after returning to London, in 1956, he published his first photo essay, on his own youth gang, in The Observer, in 1961 he became a full-time photojournalist after his reportage on the construction of the Berlin Wall brought him widespread acclaim. By 1964 he had joined the staff of The Sunday Times, which sent him on assignments to Vietnam, Biafra, India, Northern Ireland, and other areas of political conflict. In 1967, McCullin became a member of Magnum, the cooperative photo agency founded in 1947 by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger, and Chim (David Seymour); in 1984 he left The Sunday Times to return to freelance photojournalism. McCullin's work has appeared in Time, LIFE, Der Spiegel, and other periodicals, as well as the books The Destruction Business (1971), which was revised and expanded as Is Anyone Taking Notice? (1973), and Sleeping with Ghosts: A Life's Work in Photography (1994). His awards include the World press Photographer Award in 1965 for his documentation on the 1964 war in Cyprus, and he has had exhibitions at such institutions as the Victoria & Albert Museum and ICP. He received the Cornell Capa Award in 2006 from ICP.Biography
McCullin is best known for his horrifying, graphic photographs of the Vietnam War. The emotional intensity of those images, often of physically repulsive and psychologically disturbing subjects, resonates within our collective historical memory. Although his recent landscapes and still lifes portray less volatile situations, they are nonetheless pervaded by a sense of lost innocence that recalls McCullin's earlier photojournalism.
Lisa Hostetler
Handy et al. Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from th