Photographing war: Don McCullin, Vietnam and the politics of emotion

Abstract

This chapter began its life in the special exhibition hall at the Imperial War Museum North on a cold winter’s morning in January 2011. My partner and I had taken the short bus ride from our apartment in Hulme to see a collection of photographs by Don McCullin, whose haunting images of war have earned him the World Press Photo Award, the Cornell Capa Award and the Royal Photographic Society’s Special 150th Anniversary Medal. The exhibition, which was rather appropriately titled ‘Shaped by War’, brought together almost all of the iconic images that have shaped his career, taking visitors on a journey from his humble beginnings in London’s East End to his more recent work in Syria and Iraq. But the ride is anything but easy. From his early black-and-white shots of ‘The Guv’nors’ standing in the ruins of an abandoned building in Finsbury Park, London (which earned him his first contract with The Observer in 1959), to a more vivid colour portrait he took in El Salvador of three corpses being dragged from the back of a pick-up truck in 1981, the path that McCullin followed throughout his career is one that is strewn with mutilated corpses, injured bodies and grieving relatives. As we sauntered around the dimly lit room, we were bombarded withimages of death and destruction. Around every corner we were confronted with another conflict, another body, another image of grief. In the space of two hours, we had seen Congolese troops abusing prisoners in 1964; injured troops from both sides taken amidst the fighting in Vietnam between 1968 and 1969; and Phalangists posing around the body of a dead Palestinian girl in Beirut, 1962. Interspersed amongst these images of war were other icons of suffering that were no less disturbing: the emaciated figure of a small albino child from an orphanage in Biafra, still clinging to an empty tin of corned beef; a small child feeding on the shrivelled breast of his malnourished mother; homeless men scratching for a living in London’s East End during the economic turbulence of the late 1960s. The only respite was a series of personal trinkets that McCullin had picked up along the way: a collection of passports withdetails of his travels, various press cards that had been issued to him at one time or another, and the mangled remains of a Nikon F camera, which had saved his life when it was hit by a bullet in 1968. Reflecting on his experiences some years later, McCullin admitted that theviolence he had seen continued to haunt him:Now that I have stopped going to wars I still struggle with the meaning of all those experiences. Wars have dreadful differences, but also a dreadful sameness. You sleep with the dead, you cradle the dead, you live with the living who become the dead.