Don McCullin – Olympus kit user

This chap is one of my first heros in the field. He ‘showed’ an audience many ‘truths’ about war and conflict, that had previously been sanitised. I mention him now, because he used the same Olympus kit, an OM1 and 2 as i described in previous post. Really, if it was good enough for him, it certainly is for me!!

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A product of one of north London’s tougher slums, Don McCullin came of age during the WW II blitz. Later, he joined the RAF (where he acquired an interest in photography), the author sold some shots of local gang members to The Observer. Further assignments resulted, and McCullin was off on a globe-trotting career that over three decades would take him to 120 foreign countries and more than two dozen wars–in Biafra, Cambodia, the Congo, Cyprus, El Salvador, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Uganda, Vietnam, etc. During the years that he made a name for himself bringing home to newspaper readers the horrific realities of battle for noncombatants as well as front-line troops, the author narrowly escaped death on countless occasions. At once drawn to and repelled by the bloody violence whose heart of darkness he so graphically captured on film.

Amazon Books :

Unreasonable Behaviour

Sleeping With Ghosts: A Life’s Work in Photography

“Our once great newspapers, which told us what went on in the world even when we couldn’t affect it, have become instruments of a promotional culture, little more than catalogues advising us what to consume. This is not a great age in which to be a photojournalist.”

Don McCullin

British Journal of Photography. 10 September 1997