To me as an amateur photographer, he is one of the greats who has influenced me the most – though the effect of gazing on these powerful images was to wonder how I would dare ever to take a photograph again. McCullin is famous for his photographs of some of the most terrible conflicts of our time. His name is indelibly associated with images of the Congo, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia, Beirut, Northern Ireland and Iraq. Even if you don’t recognise the name, you’ll have seen his work, for example that famous photograph of the shell-shocked US marine in Vietnam, staring blankly not at the camera but through it, beyond it into a personal void that is beyond imagining.
I’d read McCullin’s autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour where he speaks memorably about his work in these calamitous war zones, his exposure to the worst human beings can do to one another. He writes: “Seeing, looking at what others cannot bear to see, is what my life as a war reporter is all about… Our knowing matters. These are sights that should, and do, bring pain, and shame, and guilt.”
He talks about the need to bear witness. “You cannot just look away.” And about the pilgrimages he has had to make to record terrible things as part of his own journey of truth-seeking and to help us with ours. “I don’t believe you can see what’s beyond the edge unless you put your head over it; I’ve been right up to the precipice. That’s the only place to be if you’re going to see and show what suffering really means.”
The Tate was busy on the day I visited. But I was struck by what I can only describe as a kind of religious hush in the galleries where the exhibition was. You did not want to talk in front of these images, so filled with human darkness and pain, so powerful in their capacity to move us to tears. In Holy Week, it was like progressing slowly and prayerfully along the Stations of the Cross. It was to be brutally yet compassionately exposed to the suffering of Jesus in his people.
I knew I needed to say something about this in my Holy Week address in the Cathedral that night. The theme was how Jesus was crucified as a result of political decisions made by people in power, how the crowd got swept up in violence that resulted in the execution of an innocent man. That seemed to me to be true of so much I was looking at in McCullin’s images. I saw once again, as clearly as I have ever seen it, how religion, if it has nothing to say about suffering, has nothing to say, whether it’s suffering caused by natural events, or by man’s inhumanity to man. And I wanted to ask where hope lay amid all this cruelty and pain.
McCullin himself to some extent responds to that question of hope, or at least the question of how we come to terms with the brutal realities of the human condition, whether in conflict zones far away, or in the deprivation of people nearer to home in our own communities. Truth, he says, is better than falsehood and illusion. Infinitely better. That's why "bearing witness" matters so much. You are told precisely this when you visit Auschwitz, or the Holocaust Memorial of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. To bear witness even to the worst atrocities imaginable is to stand against them and the lies that spawn them to begin with. Truth-seeking is a sign of hope and the possibility, if we have the will to put it into practice, that "never again" will be more than merely words.
In old age Don McCullin has taken to concentrating on landscapes. He says that while he can never “unsee” what he has witnessed, and does not wish to, his work is now largely to calm his spirit. The relics of classical antiquity have long been a favourite theme. Sometimes, an image like the ruins of Palmyra (as they used to be and as they now are, following Daesh’s destruction of what had survived), evokes the violence of our own times as well as of previous ages exacted on the remains of an ancient civilisation. He has some fine photographs of Hadrian’s Wall here in Northumberland that make a similar point, though less sharply.
But you sense that he finds artistic and spiritual solace most of all by photographing the Somerset Levels where he lives. He does this to beautiful effect. It feels healing in a gentle and life-giving way. The images are still printed dark, with high contrast and lowering skies, as if he is still haunted by the chiaroscuro, the light-and-dark journeys he has made during a lifetime. How could he not be? You have to wonder what the personal cost of his remarkable career has been. But he seems to chuckle as he reminds us that rural Somerset is not altogether a retreat from suffering, He muses that even the hills and hedgerows and waterways have their dark side, the “skull beneath the skin” where “nature red in tooth and claw” is the law of survival. Maybe it’s the insight of old age that there is, in the end, no escape from pain and death. Mortality is part of life and a spiritual task of ageing is to recognise it.
Yet there is something of resurrection about these late photographs too, eucharistic even. Photography isn’t only about being present to the way things are, noticing, paying attention, recording and interpreting, though these are necessary for any practitioner of the art. It’s also about being alive to possibilities, whether glimpsed within the composition itself or implied beyond the frame. There can be hints of transfiguration in even the bleakest of images. Which is why McCullin’s exhibition, shattering though it was to experience, did not leave me feeling hopeless. Images like his, like the Stations of the Cross indeed, have the potential to sensitise us, purify our perception of reality, alter our conventionally superficial responses to events, and thereby make us better people who can in turn build a better world. Perhaps that makes them redemptive?
“Waking up today” he writes “to a morning of birdsong, and stepping out of my back door, I spot the antlers of a deer emerging from the mist in my orchard. The light breaks through the cloud, striking the Iron Age hill fort like the fingers of God. And I find myself saying: ‘Thank you…whoever you are’.” And I find myself echoing: Amen. And even: Alleluia.
Don McCullin is at Tate Britain until 6 May.
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