Review by Don McCullin – Shattered stone heads and severed limbs reflect the horrors he saw in war | Photography

FFew people have witnessed as much horror as Don McCullen. The famous photographer, now 90, has witnessed major conflicts and disasters up close for decades. You can only imagine, from his widely published black and white photographs, how this affected him.

McCullin’s latest exhibition, Broken Beauty at the Holborn Museum in Bath, begins with four recent photographs of ruined Roman sculptures. These images—white monuments photographed on black backgrounds so that they float—are initially reminiscent of museum postcards, representations that reference ancient history and myths of murderous ambition, desire, and control. There is Venus crouched, her arms missing and her head half smashed. A hermaphrodite struggles to get away from a lecherous satyr. A headless Amazon and the Roman Emperor Commodus, known for his unrestrained cruelty, fight on horseback. Their ruined surfaces and broken limbs suggest the collapse of great empires, and the fragility of ideals that time erases, like marble.

McCullen seems to be searching for continuity in these sculptures, an acknowledgment that we have always been like this – and always will be. It may also be a justification for his role in representing it, which he devoted his life to. Will his horror pictures have the same kind of beauty, as the centuries pass?

McCullin stopped fighting wars in the mid-1980s. Since then, he has photographed the landscapes of Somerset, where he lives, in search of solace and healing. But his images of the countryside are hardly palliative: he makes the pond look like a pool of blood, and tall trees scratch the sky like torn limbs. His dying vision turns open spaces into oppressive and depressing environments haunted by ghosts. If there is beauty in this darkness, McCullin makes it hard to see.

This small exhibition spans over 60 years of work, from his first published image of a notorious gang in Finsbury Park, London, with which he began his career in 1958, to iconic images from the Biafran War and the AIDS crisis. The show is simple and straightforward, but all the drama is in McCullin’s photographs, glimpses of some of the bleakest moments in living memory. Many of the most harrowing images here focus on young people – their abhorrent penchant for violence but also their resilience and sadness.

The image of a group of young Christian Phalangists taunting the body of a teenage Palestinian girl lying on the ground in front of them as they serenade her with sick smiles and a stolen mandolin still turns my stomach, even though I’ve seen it many times. She also thinks about McCullin standing there looking at the scene. In another photo, a 15-year-old boy stares at you, his face shining with tears. He is at his father’s funeral after losing him to AIDS. Young landmine victims waiting for medical assistance, and young Palestinian soldiers, topless and carrying weapons. The vacant stare of a young, shell-shocked Marine – a reflection of the horror of what they saw, fighter and photographer. These young people, who were once optimistic about the future, are now ruined bodies among destroyed homes.

There are also many images from McCullin’s extensive UK body of work, of industrial landscapes, workers, the homeless and poverty of the periphery. A homeless man in Shoreditch, London, sleeps standing up. McCullen is drawn to these liminal states, somewhere between life and death, between past and present.

The images of conflict have a sense of immediacy that McCullen’s work since has never had. It’s hard to believe that he was able to take pictures in real time. A triptych made in Belfast in 1971 shows riot police approaching the corner of a building, preparing to attack a man in a suit armed with a plank advancing from the other side, and captures the moment when he thrusts his weapon, blindly, into their armour.

Landscapes can never carry the same immediacy and urgency that photographs like these do. They are “the sharp side of the knife,” as McCullin said, unable to pierce or wound us in the same way. Along with images of ancient ruins and still lifes that McLean photographs in his garden shed, these landscapes are perhaps intended as a respite for the viewer and for McLean himself.

His interest in landscapes and still lifes derives from the spectral presence of his earlier subjects. McCullin spoke of the “smiles of twisted corpses” he saw everywhere. This presentation is a very brief introduction to McCullin’s enormous contribution to photojournalism. But it makes clear that McCullen’s work feels most alive in the proximity of destruction and death.