What makes for a favorite artist? One measure for me is whether I return to that artist’s work and am again rewarded with a life-altering exchange of spirit.
This happened when I recently re-encountered Don McCullin via a 2019 self-titled book of essays and images from the legendary photographer’s retrospective at Tate Britain.
I instinctively knew, while pausing between images that are among the most horrific and at the same time compelling and expansive and healing I’ve seen, that I would place Sir Don McCullin in a personal pantheon[1]I perhaps have several pantheons. I say perhaps as I’ve not thought directly about the matter. I’m not sure I ever will as ordering my favorite artists has never been a favorite pastime. … Continue reading of favorite artists, alongside author William T. Vollmann and painter Francis Bacon.[2]It’s worth noting that McCullin is massively inspired by painting, Bacon professed a passion for photography and Vollmann works devotedly in both media.
What is the connection, I wondered.
Leaning into violence
All three artists have found a way to lean into violence and to get us to do the same. Their work profoundly denies us our tendency to turn away.
They also refrain from a pandering impulse to make beauty out of horror. Beauty might appear there in the content—as in the buzz of crickets in an Oregon forest during a Nez Perce War bloodbath in the Vollmann masterpiece The Dying Grass, or the strange eroticism felt via a slab of meat amidst tortured screams in a Bacon canvas—but it feels incidental, not sought.
It happens to be—it’s an inherent feature of the content, but when juxtaposed with pervasive brutality it serves as a mirror of sorts: a reminder of what our lives commonly contain and then of what shatters that and confronts us now.
A master of his medium
If beauty and its temptations are thwarted via content, form is another matter.
As with the other two artists, McCullin is a master of his medium. There is exceptional beauty in the form.
This beauty goes beyond decoration or gratification. It seduces us to move against our impulse to run away—to instead lean in.
We need not drown in horror but our world now, despite its carefully concocted scaffolding, demands that we at least touch the subject before us, if only for long enough for it to change us.
McCullin’s work is an actualization of what it should mean to see—to see far more than we like or think we can. An undeniable emotional string connects us to the subject, and in that moment we are rendered far more fragile, and yet also more capable, than we imagined.
A mother in Biafra with barren breasts attempting to feed her starving child, a man with a severe facial disfigurement standing at a market in Calcutta as teenage boys look on, cholera victims in Bangladesh, homeless men bicycling with sacks of coal in Sunderland, Christian youth celebrating the death of a Palestinian girl in Beirut, and Turkish villages in war-induced trauma during the Cyprus Civil War in 1964.[3]Years ago I interviewed award-winning war photographer Yannis Behrakis. He told me of covering the war in Yugoslavia and how he would cover one village and be witness to massive suffering. That … Continue reading
A retreat
As painful and transformative as McCullin’s war and urban photographs can be (there is a massive thematic overlap between the two as the latter contain their own kind of non-militaristic war, call it societal, economic and intra-personal) his landscapes also occupy a special place in his oeuvre.
These are high-contrast images (he does his own printing), often of fields in Somerset and the moors in Yorkshire. Thick stratus clouds press against the plains, often speckled with blackened, twisted, skeletal trees.
At first glance the land seems harsh and cruel. But as McCullin says: “My solace lies in recording what remains of the beautiful landscape of Somerset and its metallic dark skies, which give this country an aged and sometimes remote feeling as if the past is struggling against the future. The stillness of silence and sometimes my loneliness provoke my imagination, but, like the surrounding land, I am fighting to release the past in me.”
In this way McCullin’s trauma, at least a sliver of it, becomes ours. His haunted past becomes our epiphanic present.
Notes, etc.
| ↑1 | I perhaps have several pantheons. I say perhaps as I’ve not thought directly about the matter. I’m not sure I ever will as ordering my favorite artists has never been a favorite pastime. No Top 10 Lists, sorry. |
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| ↑2 | It’s worth noting that McCullin is massively inspired by painting, Bacon professed a passion for photography and Vollmann works devotedly in both media. |
| ↑3 | Years ago I interviewed award-winning war photographer Yannis Behrakis. He told me of covering the war in Yugoslavia and how he would cover one village and be witness to massive suffering. That suffering became his and the pain and injustice of it felt unbearable. Yet a short while later he would go to the next village and see the equally traumatic suffering—only this time the roles of perpetrators and victims had been reversed. McCullin’s images remind the Greek in me that suffering is not partisan. |