Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor
Don McCullin (Cornucopia, £95)
DON MCCULLIN was born in a tough neighbourhood of London and in a tough time: he was himself a child of the Second World War, an evacuee, ‘where children played at war because war was all there was’, as he noted in his autobiography. His career as a war photographer began in the mid 1960s, when he covered the conflict in Cyprus, but even his first published photograph of a youth gang in Finsbury Park shimmers with latent violence. He went on to produce some of the most pitiless—and heartbreaking—records of war and its aftershocks, from Vietnam and Biafra to Northern Ireland.
It may be that nobody would publish the sort of photographs Mr McCullin used to take: his haunting and brutal images of human suffering would sit uneasily beside the kind of upbeat lifestyle journalism that advertisers tend to support. Yet, as William Dalrymple writes in his introduction to the book: ‘Don’s bleak
