Don McCullin © Matilda Temperley

Leica Gallery Vienna and Festival La Gacilly-Baden Photo present:

Don McCullin

Artist Talk at the Leica Gallery Vienna in der Seilergasse 14, 1010 Wien.
Free entry
Registration required by e-mail to: festival@lagacilly-baden.photo

LIFE, DEATH AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN

Don McCullin has a complex relationship with war. He once even said that he chases conflicts like an alcoholic chases beer. From Cyprus to Vietnam, Cuba and Cambodia to Ireland, he played a pioneering role in photojournalism. This earned him the highest acclaim alongside photographers such as Robert Capa, Philip Jones Griffiths and Larry Burrows. McCullin’s photographs enabled the public to stay informed about events in faraway countries. They raise questions, stir public opinion and awaken the conscience.

Don McCullin was born in 1935 in the working-class neighbourhood of Finsbury Park in London and began his career rather by chance when, in 1959, one of his photos of the Guvnors gang following the murder of a police officer was published in The Observer. Although violence is often at the centre of his work, it is not its sole focus. Alongside his work as a reporter, Don McCullin took an interest in those pushed to the margins of society. He photographed the homeless, migrants and workers. The city where he was born and raised shaped his social conscience. As a witness to widespread urban poverty, he was able to highlight the breakdown of his country’s social fabric at an early stage. Through his photojournalism, he spoke out forcefully on behalf of those left behind by industrialisation and the outcasts of globalisation.

In 2017, he was knighted by the Queen for his life’s work – one of the few photographers to have received this honour. Today he lives in Somerset and devotes himself to landscape photography. Yet McCullin remains true to himself even in times of peace: in the cloud-shrouded skies of the English countryside or the scarred ruins of Palmyra in Syria, Don McCullin continues to see the scars of history and violence. Even his photographs of peaceful places appear ‘explosive’, an eternal echo of the theatres of war that have irrevocably shaped his gaze.