Wednesday 15 July 2009

Don McCullin: In England (Photography- National Media Museum, Bradford)


Don McCullin is best known as a war photographer, he started in Vietnam and has done every war since, though lately he's taken to photographing lovely landscapes, can you blame him?
This exhibition in Bradford does not focus on his war work or his new landscapes. There's a mixture of photos from the 1960s up to the present with themes of poverty, crime, class -and a fab one of the Beatles.
There are some concieted quotes stuck around the photos of homeless and mad people from McCullin saying that he didn't want to just take pictures of people he wanted to "get to know them and be a part of their world", even though the photos are amazing I still found them basically exploitative.
The reason for the exhibition being in the media museum was that a small collection of the photographs were taken in poverty striken 1970s Bradford. These photos I found the most terrifying, this is the late 70s, the children in those photographs are the same age as my friends and they're living in what looks like post-war squalor!
Anyway, it was a really good exhibition, with some really memorable photos, if you're going to the imax to see Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince this week, have a look at the exhibition upstairs, it's free.
(In England is in Bradford until the 27th of September)

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