Don McCullin evaluate – shattered stone heads and severed limbs echo the horrors he noticed in battle | Photography

Few individuals have seen as a lot horror as Don McCullin. The feted photographer, now 90, witnessed main conflicts and disasters up shut for many years. You can solely think about, by his extensively revealed black and white footage, how which may have affected him.

McCullin’s newest exhibition, Broken Beauty on the Holburne Museum in Bath, begins with 4 current footage of ruined Roman sculptures. These photographs – the white ruins photographed towards black backgrounds in order that they float – are reminiscent at first of museum postcards, representations of representations that consult with historical historical past and myths of deadly ambition, want and domination. There’s a crouching Venus, her arms lacking and head half-shattered. A hermaphrodite struggles to get away from a lascivious satyr. A headless Amazon and the Roman emperor Commodus, identified for his uninhibited cruelty, are combating on horseback. Their pockmarked surfaces and damaged limbs recommend the collapse of the nice empires, the fragility of beliefs which are obliterated by time, like marble.

McCullin appears to seek for continuity in these sculptures, an acknowledgment that we’ve all the time been like this – and all the time will probably be. And maybe additionally, they’re a justification for his personal position, in representing it, one thing he has devoted his life to. Will his photographs of horror have the identical type of magnificence, with the gap of centuries?

McCullin stopped going to wars within the mid-Eighties. He has since photographed landscapes in Somerset, the place he lives, on the lookout for solace and therapeutic. But his footage of the countryside are hardly anodyne: he makes a pond appear like a pool of blood, spindly bushes scratching the sky like torn limbs. His moribund visions flip open areas into oppressive, brooding environments stalked by ghosts. If there’s magnificence on this darkness, McCullin makes it onerous to see.

This small exhibition spans greater than 60 years of labor, from his first revealed image of a infamous gang in Finsbury Park, London, that kickstarted his profession in 1958, to iconic photographs from the Biafran battle and the Aids disaster. The presentation is unfussy and simple, however all of the drama is in McCullin’s images, glimpses of a few of the bleakest moments in residing reminiscence. Many of essentially the most harrowing photographs right here give attention to younger males – their abhorrent propensity for violence but in addition their resilience and grief.

The image of a bunch of younger Christian Phalangists mocking the lifeless physique of a teenage Palestinian woman who lies on the ground in entrance of them as they serenade her with sickly smiles and a stolen mandolin, nonetheless makes my abdomen flip, although I’ve seen it many instances. You assume, too, of McCullin standing there, wanting on the scene. In one other image, a 15-year-old boy stares proper at you, his face shiny with tears. He is at his father’s funeral, having misplaced him to Aids. Young landmine victims ready for medical assist, younger Palestinian troopers, topless and carrying weapons. A shellshocked younger marine’s vacant stare – a mirrored image of the horror of what they’ve seen, fighter and photographer. These younger males, who as soon as held the optimism of the longer term, at the moment are ruined our bodies amongst wrecked houses.

There are additionally a number of footage from McCullin’s intensive physique of UK work, of commercial landscapes and employees, homeless individuals and poverty on the peripheries. A homeless man in Shoreditch, London, sleeps standing up. McCullin is drawn to those liminal states, someplace between life and dying, previous and current.

The battle footage have a way of pace that McCullin’s work since might by no means have. It’s onerous to imagine he was capable of take the images in actual time. A triptych made in Belfast in 1971 reveals riot police edging across the nook of a constructing, prepared for the assault of a person in a go well with armed with a plank who advances from the opposite facet, catching the second he hurls his weapon, blindly, in direction of their shields.

The landscapes can by no means maintain the identical immediacy and urgency as images like these. They are the “blunt side of the knife”, as McCullin has mentioned, unable to pierce or wound us in the identical manner. Alongside the traditional spoil images and the nonetheless lifes McCullin makes in his backyard shed, these landscapes are meant, maybe, as a reprieve for the viewer, and for McCullin himself.

His curiosity in landscapes and nonetheless lifes is derived from the spectral presence of his earlier topics. McCullin has talked of the “twisted smiles of corpses” he sees in all places. This present is a really temporary introduction to McCullin’s immense contribution to photojournalism. But it reveals that it’s in proximity to devastation and dying that McCullin’s work feels most alive.