McCullin
Directed by David Morris and Jacqui Morris
2013
At the crossroads between retrospective, memoir and painful confession, McCullin presents the staggering stoicism of one of Britain’s most acclaimed and uncompromising war photographers, Don McCullin.
Directed by McCullin’s former assistant Jacqui Morris and her brother David, the documentary is striking in its simple, effective structure. Apart from some shots of London and its destitute and eccentric inhabitants, the documentary follows the photographer’s career from battleground to battleground, as he documented the most exacerbated civil wars, the massacres and the political conflicts of those years. Journalistic footage brings back to life on the screen the mad euphoria, the danger and the unleashed violence of those moments, against which McCullin's photographs stand as crystallized moments of silence, breaching out of insanity.
But this series of wars brings more than chronological order to the matter. As McCullin himself observed, if he could not be in one war, there was always another one somewhere else, waiting for him and his camera. Out of the haunting, distressing mosaic of human suffering his photographs have delivered over the years, appears the universal, baffling footprint of men’s cruelty.
Through their tribute to McCullin, the Morris’s build a nostalgic monument to the years of independent, daring and committed photojournalism. Published in series and with text in The Observer and the Sunday Times, McCullin’s photographs had the ambition to render war present in the homes of the middle class. They seemed to want to narrow the gaps of a more and more media-connected, yet physically removed, global world.
Painfully negotiating their status between art and journalism, McCullin’s photographs tested the limits of war photography. What is legitimate for a photographer to capture? To what extent and with what purpose can photography sublimate documentation? Compared with the savage use of shock photography in today’s media, McCullin’s work appears as a painful, restless confrontation with the ethics of photography.
In its most touching moments, McCullin reveals what pictures published for the world to be seen had meant for one man the moment they were taken. Throughout the documentary, McCullin injects new life into his most iconic photographs by narrating the circumstances in which they were taken. One realises that his work has been a constant juggling between the pragmatism of his craft and the impulses of his emotions.
Next to those raised by his photographs, McCullin's sober, yet moving voice silently evokes a more personal question: war photographer yes - inevitably - but at what price. McCullin's sensibility sits at the opposite of scandal and shock - his words, as his photographs, have the rare poise, emotion and depth of the earnest observer.
Next to those raised by his photographs, McCullin's sober, yet moving voice silently evokes a more personal question: war photographer yes - inevitably - but at what price. McCullin's sensibility sits at the opposite of scandal and shock - his words, as his photographs, have the rare poise, emotion and depth of the earnest observer.
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