{"id":97961,"date":"2025-10-24T05:12:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T05:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/97961\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T05:12:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T05:12:10","slug":"don-mccullin-looks-back-at-one-of-his-earliest-images-the-guvnors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/97961\/","title":{"rendered":"Don McCullin Looks Back at One of His Earliest Images, The Guvnors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ahead of his 90th birthday and his new show, A Desecrated Serenity, at Hauser & Wirth in New York, photographer Don McCullin takes us back to an off-the-cuff Sunday in 1958October 23, 2025<\/p>\n

This story is taken from the Autumn\/Winter 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the first photographs I ever took was The Guvnors, a picture of a gang of boys I went to school with. It was off-the-cuff, a Sunday in 1958. They said, \u2018Listen, why don\u2019t you go and get that camera, take a picture of us?\u2019 I belted up to the house, brought the camera down \u2013 but I didn\u2019t have a great deal of enthusiasm. They all had suits on, it was sunny. I took one frame and that negative is still great today. When they went on to become implicated in the murder of a policeman, The Observer asked to publish the image and suddenly I was a photographer \u2013 that picture was the first page of my working life, though I\u2019ve always felt photography chose me. Not long afterwards, I was sitting in Cafe\u0301 de Flore in Paris with my first wife and I looked over her shoulder and saw a newspaper picture of an East German soldier jumping over the wire into the West with his Kalashnikov and helmet. I knew I needed to go to Berlin. My life has been blessed by making the right decision at the right time \u2013 I was on that wonderful conveyor belt going in the right direction. My eyes were always open \u2013 for some reason they were hungry eyes that were constantly looking for information, events, happenings. I was alive. I had a camera, these eyes and I had a quest. I could see better than anybody else. It was a great gift, whoever gave me this gift. Though nothing I\u2019ve done in my life has ever done any good.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

4Don McCullin for AnOther Magazine A\/W 2025<\/a><\/p>\n

Don McCullin, the most influential war photographer of our time, is 90 this autumn \u2013 an event that coincides with his new show, A Desecrated Serenity, at Hauser & Wirth, New York. For McCullin, the milestone birthday is not a jubilant moment: \u201cThere\u2019s nothing to celebrate about being one of the lucky chosen. I\u2019m just going to say thankfully, quietly, how lucky I am. I don\u2019t feel great about outliving other people.\u201d Coming from Finsbury Park and \u201call the worst possible ingredients of background \u2013 racism, violence, bigotry, ignorance\u201d, McCullin went on to risk his life (wounded in Cambodia, cerebral malaria in West Africa, imprisonment by Idi Amin in Uganda), bringing the realities of war to British breakfast tables for nearly 20 years under Harold Evans at The Sunday Times. He documented the Vietnam and Biafra wars, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Lebanese Civil War and the fall of Phnom Penh, among many other conflicts.<\/p>\n

\"Pin<\/a>\"MCCUL72022-hires\"The Guvnors in their Sunday Suits, Finsbury Park, London 1958Photography by Don McCullin. \u00a9 Don McCullin. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth<\/p>\n

Violence and pain have followed McCullin, even haunting him from the barbarous beginnings of the Roman marble sculptures he now loves to capture \u2013 many examples of which will be juxtaposed (alongside luminous platinum prints of floral still lifes and landscapes) with his earlier war images in his forthcoming show. He\u2019s most proud of these calm and meditative works. \u201cWhat I\u2019m trying to do is run away from my war past, trying to clean up my act \u2013 I think it will exonerate my worrying. It will show that I don\u2019t just rely on the suffering of others. I\u2019ve never been more strong in my sentiments that my work has been a passing effort \u2013 look at Gaza. But I thought it was only right to show there was more in me than just looking at other people\u2019s loss. At night, when I go to bed, if I\u2019m lying on my own my past comes rushing back.\u201d<\/p>\n

This story features in the Autumn\/Winter 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale\u00a0now<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Don McCullin A Desecrated Serenity<\/a> is at Hauser & Wirth New York until 8 November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ahead of his 90th birthday and his new show, A Desecrated Serenity, at Hauser & Wirth in New…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":97962,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-97961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}