Exhibition Review

Shaped by War - Don McCullin IWM 7 Oct 2011-15 April 2012

How Don McCullin is still sane after all he has witnessed and documented is a miracle in itself for there can't have been many conflicts in the world over the last half century that wasn't visited by his Nikons and rolls of black and white film. Indeed one of those iconic cameras possibly saved his life when it "took" an AK-47 Khmer Rouge bullet as McCullin crawled through a padi filed in Cambodia in 1970. Like McCullin that camera made it back to blighty and the results of that partnership now form the basis of a major retrospective at the Imperial War Museum.

However this exhibition should come with a health warning as many of the photographs make for harrowing viewing. McCullin risked life and limb in places as varied as Belfast, Biafra, Beiruit and the Belgian Congo in his quest to portray the futile brutality and degradation mankind sometimes inflicts upon itself; no punches are pulled as the viewer is not spared the gore and carnage. McCullin, who worked mainly for the Sunday Times, was probably the finest British war photojournalist of his generation and "getting the picture" no matter what the danger was to take its emotional toll. In his autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour (Cape 1990) he says "I felt I had seen so much horror that is was likely to destroy me" and wandering through this well-laid out exhibition it is plain to see why. If humanity ever needs to remind itself where sometimes it has gone off track then the necessary prod could well be found on the 2nd floor of this famous old museum in south-east London.

Happily McCullin conquered his depression, he gave up going to war zones but kept up his interest in photography, still using high contrast black and white film he now concentrated on more serene genres such as landscape and still life and this later work too is exhibited towards the end of the tour. It provides a soothing few minutes after all the horrors so plentiful earlier in his career.

a Turkish Cypriot villager lies dead, shot in his own house during the Cyprus conflict in 1964.