Critical Evaluation - Essay Example

? Critical Evaluation of Critical Evaluation Figure List McCullin, Don, "My last war with Anthony Loyd, December 2012" (Anthony Loyd and Don McCullin Atmeh, on the Syria-Turkey border) 2. McCullin, Don, "My last war with Anthony Loyd, December 2012" (Don McCullin for The Times) 3. McCullin, Don (2012) "Don McCullin's Last War: The Times" 4. McCullin, Don, "Don McCullin in Syria, December 2012" (Hannah Strange) 5. McCullin, Don, "Don McCullin in Aleppo, December 2012" 6. McCullin, Don, "Don McCullin's last war with Anthony Loyd, December 2012" 7. McCullin, Don, "Don McCullin in Syria, December 2012" Don McCullin, internationally known British photojournalist, is majorly renowned and known for his war photography and post-war coverage especially for his visit to Syria at the age of 77. His work features 134 exceptionally taken photographs that cover world's most dangerous and conflicted images. For the first time, the work of a British photojournalist is being exhibited in the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) till April 14, 2013. Major newspapers and magazines including The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Observer have also printed his works. McCullin has always depicted the unemployed, the impoverished and the downtrodden. NGC director and CEO Marc Mayer reported to have said, "McCullin's photographs belong in an art gallery because they consistently bring clarity and compositional grace to their compelling subject matter. These pictures are both hard to look at and hard not to" (Mallet, 2013). However, his recent encounter of Syria has not been displayed in the gallery, as Sobey Curatorial Assistant Katherine Stauble writes, "Likely (these images) were not meant to hang on a gallery wall, but rather, to communicate information, to reveal truths and to mobilize action. Now that McCullin has escaped the battlefield and for the past twenty years has been focusing his lens on landscape and still life, one might expect the artist moniker to sit more comfortably with him" (as cited in Mallet, 2013). The following attached files are few of pictures of his last war with Anthony Loyd: Figure 1: Anthony Loyd and Don McCullin Atmeh, on the Syria-Turkey border. According to McCullin, "Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures" (Mallet, 2013). This is what has been the most predominant feature of McCullin's photography as shown in Figure. 1. There has been embedded in his pictures "the feelings of people" rather than focusing on the other artistic values (figure 1). He, through his images, has tried to get the sympathetic feelings for the affected people. By capturing a child's picture, he is making use of emotions and feelings of people to get attention. As Susan Sontag writes in her book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), that sufferings and emotions sell more than any other factors (Sontag, 2003). Figure 2: Don McCullin for The Times. The most effective and credible advantage of McCullin's work (as shown in Figure. 2) would be his unbiased reporting. He not only showed images of the public dying and their sorrows, but he also showed the sorrows of the free Syrian army (Figure 2). "I'm just a carrier pigeon that brings the message back home" (Archer, 2013), says McCullin. Thus, effectively, his images do not downplay the role of one opposing army to another nor do they cast blame on any side. His images can never prove to be the barriers against peace-making between the conflicted armies (Greenslade, 2013). The images represent war in a way that they do not exploit people nor do they express problematic ideas that would exacerbate the situation and/or the relationship between photographer and his subject (figure 2). Figure 3: McCullin in Syria McCullin's photography explicitly points out at the major weakness of his images which was the portrayal of sufferings of the evicted people as shown in Figure 3. According to Susan Moeller, the author of Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death, “watching and reading about suffering, especially suffering that exists somewhere else, somewhere interestingly exotic or perhaps deliciously close, has become a form of entertainment” (Moeller, 1999, p. 34). Further she says, "suffering, rather than good news, sells" (Moeller, 1999, p. 34). Sufferings have now become a source of infotainment and a ladder of success. One can reasonably argue that McCullin's work was not an exception (figure 3). According to Taylor John, the writer of Body Horror: Photojournalism, catastrophe and war, "a war apparently without bodies is an imaginative and bureaucratic feat achieved by direct omission (as in censorship)" (John, 1998, p. 157). But, the work of Don McCullin does not seem to hide the reality over some political and bureaucratic forces. It focused on "realisation" rather than "derealisation". However, Virilio describes this open view of sorrow as an ineffective approach. To him, concealing the injuries, wounds, deaths or miseries are 'aesthetics of disappearance' (John, 1998). McCullin's wok, thus, may be too bold to show such sorrows. Figure 4: Don McCullin: Hannah Strange McCullin's aim of the visit to his last war was: "to show the human toil of fighting". "We don't need any more scenes of snipers and rebels firing over brick walls," he told the BBC. "What we really need is the human interest side of this story" (BBC, 2012). "The children play on the streets here as if it's Guy Fawkes night, with all these explosions going on around them" (BBC, 2012) (as shown in Figure 4). This was the aim of his photography which according to Susan Sontag, in her essay: Regarding the Pain of Others, was unethical. Sontag critiques McCullin's work as a mere display of "commercial ghoulishness" (Sontag, 2003). According to her, '[t]he feeling persists that the appetite for such images is a vulgar or low appetite; that it is commercial ghoulishness' (Sontag, 2003, p.112). Hence, it is no wrong to say that although these images may be informative and they may give a "true and fair" value of reality, but they are also considered to be a part of unethical activity. Figure 5: Don McCullin in Aleppo. This iconic picture is a show of reality at Syria, and such photographs caused the people of other countries to sympathize and divert their attention here (Archer, 2013) (Figure 5). McCullin was successful in bringing a large amount of funds by UK and other countries to Syria through his images (Archer, 2013). His images instilled in people around the globe a feeling to fear war and its consequences. It enabled people to empathize with the sufferers and the victims. Not only this, but it was able to make people protest against the warfare. So, effectively, one could argue that McCullin's work was an eye-opener to many nations. His work became the basis of avoidance of such warfare situations in other countries. Figure 6: Don McCullin's last war with Anthony Loyd. The images of Syrian tour have not been displayed on the NGC, as Sontag argues that: "it seems exploitative to look at harrowing photographs of other people's pain in an art gallery' (Sontag 119). She notes that: 'it seems normal to turn away from images that make us feel bad' (Sontag 116). Hence, (rightly so) McCullin's recent take on Syria was not been portrayed in the exhibition. Another reviewer of McCullin's photography is reported to have quoted an audience's reaction which was: "Too searing, too dreadful for comfort? Only if your own snug cocoon of ignorance is more important than feeling humanity's pain" (Greenslade, 2013). Furthermore, the image shows scarred landscape and no people around and rather than black and white photograph, a colored tableau is used (as shown in Figure 6), indicating the characteristics of contemporary fine arts photographers. Brett Rogers, director of "The Photographers" gallery in London, describes Don McCullin's images as “[d]evoid of drama, surgically precise images, radically installed, push the boundaries of the photographic medium” (BBC, 2012). The street shown in the picture (figure 6) is obscured and war is portrayed not by dead bodies and blood, but by the destruction of the environment around and sufferings of people. Taylor mentioned this situation as: '[t]he imagery of the techno-war emerged as unpeopled, as functional instruments without accountability [in] a contrivance of information – abstract, quantitative, unassailable, and completely alterable' (Taylor, 1997, p.157). Figure 7: Don McCullin in Syria. Susan Sontag critiques the presentation of warfare as being "spectacle" in her essay "Regarding the Pain of Others". She adds, "Each situation has to be turned into a spectacle to be real - that is, interesting - to us" (Sontag, 2003, p. 180). Yet another remarkable impression that McCullin's pictures were able to make was the lack of western aid coming to the country as depicted in Figure.7. His images unmasked the reality of the absence of western aid, and forced the westerners to think about this issue and take corrective actions against the case. He said, "The road back from Aleppo was completely empty of any aid trucks that should be making their way into the city…That's the annoying thing. We've pledged all kinds of support, but there's nothing tangible coming into Syria in terms of aid and medical supplies" (BBC, 2012) (Figure 7). Misery and sorrow was the ultimate catch of his photography. Simon Norfork comments on warfare and photojournalism in the words, "[t]he thing that pisses me off about so much modern art is that it carries no politics – it has nothing that it wants to say about the world" (Manaugh). Further he adds, "I'm fed up with the cliches of photojournalism, with its inability to talk about anything complicated" (Manaugh, 2010). Arguably, the photojournalism of McCullin also lacks the political message. It, instead of using his power to influence a right person for the right move, manipulates others with the devastating portrayals. McCullin's admitted in his own words after his return from the warfare that, "I have been manipulated, and I have in turn manipulated others, by recording their response to suffering and misery. So there is guilt in every direction: guilt because I don't practice religion, guilt because I was able to walk away, while this man was dying of starvation or being murdered by another man with a gun. And I am tired of guilt, tired of saying to myself: "I didn't kill that man on that photograph, I didn't starve that child." That's why I want to photograph landscapes and flowers. I am sentencing myself to peace" (BBC, 2012). McCullin sources images from different places and times and bring them together for the exhibit because he portrays war as a universal entity not particular to any region or time. Each part of the world is or may be conflicted with this situation; hence, he makes no discrimination in his work by putting places and/or times in his work. This has a possibility of exhausting one's ability to empathize with the victims of the war since war becomes an inevitable part of the human experience. Moreover, McCullin's work rejects the findings of the humanist tradition of photography. The main features of humanistic paradigm are universality, historicity, quotidienality, empathy, commonality and monochromaticity (Peter, 1997). The time and place are ambiguous since the images are taken from varying course of his work; hence, it lacks the "historic" approach. Also, the event is not an everyday situation for the majority of the work's audience. However, it has the "universalic" approach (Peter, 1997) as the feelings and emotions of people are clearly shown and expressed in his work. For instance, all the figures above explicitly depict sorrow, grief and the terrible post-war conditions. In conclusion, Don McCullin's work was able to avoid (in some cases) as well as to gather the pitfalls and/or the drawbacks of traditional photojournalism. His representation of war in his last encounter was done in a way that had images of sorrow, grief, malnourishment and disappointment all around. Rather than portraying the "censored" or "fake" impression of the warfare, he continued to show the world "its reality" and the true and fair conditions of the warfare. The major drawbacks of his work fall under the category of being unethical and of avoiding the humanistic perspectives. On the contrary, some of the major strengths included: no bureaucratic intervention or no hidden reality, and becoming successful in receiving aid from various regions to the affected country through his interpretation. Despite of McCullin's success in his career of war photojournalism that he has been doing over the years, he feels guilty. As he tells Metro's Ann Lee: "I feel guilty because i have made a success out of my photographic life" (Greenslade, 2013). List of References Archer, B., 2013. Legendary War Photographer Don McCullin Wonders What It Was All Worth. Hazlitt, 28 February. BBC, 2012. War photographer Don McCullin in final front-line trip. [Online] Available at: [Accessed 23 March 2013]. Greenslade, R., 2013. Greenslade Blog. [Online] Available at: [Accessed 23 March 2013]. John, T., 1998. Body Horror: photojournalism, catastrophe and war. Manchestor: Manchestor University Press. Mallet, J. B., 2013. Don McCullin: A Retrospective. First solo exhibition in Canada of world-renowned British photojournalist. National Gallery of Canada, 30 January. Manaugh, G., 2010. Simon Norfolk on Art & Politics. [Online] Available at: [Accessed March 2013]. Moeller, S., 1999. Compassion fatigue: How the Media Sells Disease, Famine, War and Death. London: Routledge. Owen, J., 2012. On the edge of reason: The torment of Don McCullin. The Independent, 30 December. Peter, H., 1997. Representing the social: France and Frenchness in post-war humanist photography. Oxford: Sage. Sontag, S., 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin. Read More