Don McCullin

Sir Don McCullin was born in 1935 in London’s Finsbury Park, a poor and rough area at the time. Leaving school at fifteen with no qualifications, McCullin signed up to National Service in the RAF as a photographic assistant. In 1959, McCullin took his first published photograph of The Guvnors, a London gang who had been involved in a murder. This inimitable image appeared in The Observer that same year. It was this, teamed with his decision based on nothing more than his own intuition to go to Berlin to photograph the start of the building of the Wall, which secured his contract with The Observer in 1961. Initially based on projects in London, his commissions soon took him around the world, starting with the Cyprus War in 1964. This marked the start of his career as a photographer of war and other human disasters.

Between 1966 and 1984, McCullin worked for The Sunday Times Magazine.

In more recent years, McCullin has continued to travel internationally, photographing and printing new works from countries such as India, Syria and Africa, where he documented the AIDS crisis. One of his most ambitious journeys has been to explore the ruins in the southern fringes of the Roman Empire, a project that spanned over a number of years, and is documented in McCullin’s book Southern Frontiers: A Journey Across the Roman Empire (2010). His newer images include the British landscape, notably of Somerset, where he now lives with his third wife.