In November 2020, it was announced Angelina Jolie would be directing a biopic about McCullin, with Tom Hardy in the starring role. It is being adapted from McCullin's biography Unreasonable Behaviour by Gregory Burke. [21] Publications [ edit ] Émile Béchard, Femme du Luxor from McCullin's personal selection of photographs from the National Media Museum's collection, 2009. One,in particular,caught my attention.In Beirut,teenage boys play music and laugh while a corpse lies in the foreground. Despite his reputation as a war photographer, McCullin has said that Alfred Stieglitz was a key influence on his work. [7] Personal life [ edit ] Eventually,he had to resign and move to advertising to keep earning.His personal life unraveled when his first wife died and the second one left him.

I was blown away by the Don McCullin exhibition at the Tate Britain & so I’m devouring his autobiography... I also splashed out on the impressive book of pictures that accompanies the exhibition; beautifully shot, harrowing, very occasionally amusing pictures from a lifetime of photo journalism. McCullin, Donald; Lewis Chester (2002). Unreasonable Behaviour, An Autobiography. Vintage Books. pp.28–29. ISBN 978-0-09-943776-5. In my teenage years, I became obsessed with Vietnam war films. I devoured everyone I could come across. Big or small budgets made no difference to me. But these films were never going to entirely capture what it was like for the men and women who served out there. So I turned to the literary world in hopes of gleaming just a fraction of what it was like to have had boots on the ground. As I scoured the available information a set of photos came up time and again. With just a little digging the name Dom McCullin came up. His images of the war seemed to capture some of the true horrors of what they faced in a raw and unfiltered way that I think the general public had not really been exposed to before. A great many years later I was able to go to an exhibit of his works this time however it was of the landscape of his home county. As it turns out just a few miles away from where I live. It was fascinating to see someone's work switched to a completely different subject matter. Yet his work still had the same ability to make you stop and just stare as if held by some unseen force. I have long admired Don McCullin's heroic journey through some of the most appalling zones of suffering in the last third of the 20th century," Sontag wrote in her essay. "We now have a vast repository of images that make it harder to preserve such moral defectiveness. Let the atrocious images haunt us Seeing reality in the form of an image cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers." After a career spanning sixty years, Sir Don McCullin, once a witness to conflict across the globe, has become one of the great landscape photographers of our time. McCullin’s pastoral view is far from idyllic. Though the woods and stream close to his house in Somerset have offered some respite, he has not sought out the quiet corners of rural England. He is drawn, instead, to the drama of approaching storms. He has an acute sense of how the emptiness of his immediate landscape echoes a wider tone of disquiet.His career seems to have been a mix of visits to places in the midst of terrible conflict and more cultural coverage. A lot of which we here in the UK either quietly ignored at the time or have totally forgotten about now - Cyprus, the Middle-East, South and Central America, Vietnam, Cambodia and various parts of Africa. His life was often at risk in these places (and he mentions time and time again journalists and photographers that died in the places he managed to get away from.) His work was either for continental magazines or for British newspapers, initially the Observer and then the Times and Sunday Times. Old age is making me frail. I stumble sometimes. I just had an operation to remove a tumour. I’m unfazed by the pain.

Don McCullin biography". Under Fire: Images from Vietnam. Piece Unique Gallery. Archived from the original on 11 March 2007 . Retrieved 30 March 2007.

The landscapes in Britain and Southern Frontiers occupy the final rooms of the retrospective. We see them after seeing all the horrors that McCullin has photographed—an aesthetic reward, of sorts. But at the same time this turn to the pictorial, is not that far removed from what came before. Pictorial form has always been central to his photography.