Don McCullin

Through the Lens: Studies of Photographers

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.

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