Listen free for 30 days
Listen with offer
-
Don McCullin
- Through the Lens: Studies of Photographers
- Narrated by: Dana Brewer Harris
- Length: 13 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
99p for the first 3 months
Don McCullin
Buy Now for £2.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Summary
Armed American soldiers stand in the stone window frames of a ruined building in Berlin, curious and disturbing echoes of those classical statues that so often were used to add portentous significance to a facade; but here in a 1961 photograph by Don McCullin, they are overlooking, with some intensity, the East German military on the other side - the Wall has just been built. Chronicling another painful divide in 1964, McCullin photographed a distraught, silently screaming widow, a Turkish Cypriot victim of that civil war, restrained and held by other women, in an oddly dignified frozen tableau.
In a 1968 photograph a US Marine pauses for thought, inadvertently echoing those renaissance paintings of meditating scholars, holding his helmet rather than a book - but this is a quiet moment in the battle for Hue. It is McCullin's photographs which helped to define the savage war in Vietnam for Britain, and beyond. Some is unbearably sad: a young North Vietnamese soldier, a casualty of Hue, stares sightlessly at the photographer, his hands outstretched to the detritus of his pockets, scattered on the earth beside the body - bullets and photographs of his family, wife, and babies.