In England

Description

Don McCullin's In England returns to the cities and landscape he knew as a young photographer, combining his greatest work with previously unpublished photographs. Don McCullin's view of England is rooted in his wartime childhood and growing up around Finsbury Park in the fifties. His first published photograph was a picture of a gang from his neighbourhood, which appeared in a newspaper after a local murder; McCullin always balanced his anger at the unacceptable face of the nation with tenderness or compassion. In England combines some of his greatest work with an entirely new body of photographs. McCullin sees his home country with its perpetual social gulf between the affluent and the desperate in mind. He continues in the same black and white tradition as he did between foreign assignments for the Sunday Times in the sixties and seventies, when his view of a deprived Britain seemed as dark as the conflict zones from which he'd just escaped. This book marks his return to the cities and landscape he knew as a young photographer. At a time when we might believe the world has changed beyond our imagination, McCullin shows us a view of England where the line between the wealthy and the deprived is as defined as ever. This time he adds wry humour to his lyricism, as if the nation is as absurd as it is tragic.

Sir Don McCullin grew up in north London. He worked for the Sunday Times for eighteen years and covered every major conflict in his adult lifetime until the Falklands War. The finest British photojournalist of his generation, he has received many honours and awards including the CBE. He received a knighthood in the 2017 New Year honours list. He lives in Somerset.

An emotional record of a homeland that is contradictory, eccentric and still riven with the stain of class division.... [McCullin] is motivated by beauty and the power of single image to tell a story. -- Alex Schneidrman * Black & White Photography *