Review: Don McCullin @ Tate Britain
It says something about the reputation of veteran war photographer Don McCullin that not only does he have an enormous retrospective currently in progress at the Imperial War Museum, but he has a second one within a stone’s throw along the river at Tate Britain. Although you might imagine the two exhibitions would be in competition with each other they are in fact very different affairs. The Tate Britain largely shies away from McCullin’s photographs of war, and focuses instead on some of the work he might prefer to be remembered for. Prominent amongst these are two projects begun in the nineteen sixties when his photographic career was still relatively young.
In one McCullin returns to the North of England where he was an evacuee during the war (a traumatic experience he has occasionally compared to his later experiences in war) to produce a series of photographs of the industrial heartlands of England. Factories and pits loom large in these images, dwarfing the people who work and live around them and darkening the skies with seemingly all pervasive black smoke. This is not a particularly sympathetic rendering of the north, probably reflecting McCullin’s early experiences there, and even the more light hearted images (a woman pushing a pram past a bleak pit complex for example) are tinged with threat.
A very different series follows, about homelessness in London’s east end. The subjects, the people themselves, loom very large in these stark images. They are strange mix, some obviously taken without the subject’s knowledge, the quintessential shot of the dehumanised, faceless homeless person in a doorway that I have to say I hate so much. Some of the other images are however the opposite, there is clearly interaction between photographer and subject. Some of these are quite wide shots, but a couple are portrait like and starkly beautiful. One of a man crouching by a fire with his hands over his face is almost religious. Still this is a problematic collection of images, particularly treated as they are in this setting, as works of art with little context.
Closest to the photographs of war McCullin is best known for are a series he took in Berlin as the wall was going up in the early sixties. While this doesn’t show actual conflict it shows the mounting tension on both sides as two armies face off for a possible conflict between east and west. This is amusingly contrasted though against West Germans going about their lives, shopping on the busy street of capitalist West Berlin. The interaction between army and civilians is nicely captured. One excellent picture is dominated by a soldier’s boot and a machinegun filling almost the entire frame, while in the background another soldier checks out a passing woman. In another East German guards peer over the border cautiously but curiously. It gives the event the feel not of two superpowers preparing to annihilate each other but of two small tribes meeting for the first time across a river, unsure of each other’s intentions.
McCullin’s recent landscape work also makes an appearance. In the IWM retrospective I felt these images were dwarfed to insignificance when displayed alongside pictures of starving children and napalmed babies. It felt impossible to perform the mental acrobatics of going from one subject to another and as a result I just felt the landscapes were a bit dull. In the rather different context of the Tate retrospective it’s much easier to appreciate them for what they are. Brooding, dark and threatening landscapes.
In short this is a very different exhibition to the Imperial War Museum retrospective, but definitely complimentary to it, and if you plan on going to one you might as well take a bus along the river and visit the other. This exhibition offers an altogether different take on McCullin’s photography, and one I think he might rather prefer considering his frequent attempts to distance himself from the title of war photographer. Here you can see quite how much more complicated his photography is, and also get a sense of the different directions his photographic career might have evolved in if he hadn’t gone to war.
Don McCullin is on at the Tate Britain until 4th March 2012
