Snowy the Mouse Man, Cambridge, 1973

Don McCullin’s photography has inspired people all over the world since he first started back in 1958, when a photo of his local Teddy boy gang in Finsbury Park, The Guv’nors (below), was published in the Observer after a policeman was murdered by one of the gang members. In his most recent exhibition In England, at the National Media Museum in Bradford, his photos capture insights into his attitudes on class, society and life from the 50’s. It also draws attention away from his more prestigious work in war torn countries and back to the place he calls home.

Growing up in Finsbury Park in the 1950s taught McCullin to be tough, “If my mother didn’t clout me someone else did that day.” He earned a scholarship to a local arts school but was forced to work when his father died. At age 15 he worked as a pot washer on a northbound train service. “I was going through amazing satanic cities over amazing railway bridges and looking down at communities, which were completely covered in black soot. I was already beginning to ferment and to explore the landscape of the society I lived in, which was a tricky society because I came from the bottom of the pack.”

The Guvnors

Curator Colin Harding notes, “Don’s vision of England is not a pretty one. He photographed what he saw and what he saw was often harsh – poverty, unemployment, discrimination. But he always photographs with passion and empathy.”

In 1969 McCullin took a series of pictures in London’s East End. The people in them had mental problems, were by and large alcoholics and dangerous, but he felt they were worth documenting. In the Homeless and mentally disturbed Irishman picture, the man’s wild eyes, protruding veins in his neck and threatening stoop, create a sense of unrest and delirium.

Homeless and mentally disturbed Irishman, Aldgate, 1969

His series of photos taken in Bradford in 1978 depict a city in a time full of hardship, but McCullin says it was one of the most hospitable places he had yet visited. The picture, Asian worker, at the Bingley Iron Foundry shows a face that is blank yet full of sadness. He looks tired, dirty and his shirt is torn. McCullin only chose to shoot the alienated and deprived as these were the people who needed his representation and who he could identify with growing up.

Protestor, Cuban missile crisis, Whitehall, London, 1968

The photo Protestor, Cuban missile crisis makes a stark contrast to the recent G20 protests with the police scrums and beatings.

In his home county of Somerset, he took some of his most serene photographs with spectacular lighting. This is what he calls ‘cathedral lighting’ or ‘God’s light’, when the sun beam comes down in shafts through the clouds. In his autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour he explains why his war pictures were always printed so dark - “How can such experiences be conveyed with a feeling of lightness?” This sense of darkness in him he says has come about from seeing such awful events, but with landscape he is photographing as “a free man".

Somerset, 1997

McCullin’s work spans one of the most poignant times in modern history, covering the most controversial and brutal wars of the century. But it is in his work at home, in Britain, and in his home county that he has found some solace and pleasure in his work.

Don McCullin by John Gibb, Somerset 1987

In England runs from 8th May to 27th September at the National Media Museum