When I take a black-and-white portrait, it's not particularly meant to please you. It's meant to talk to you; it's meant to shame you. It's meant to scream out at you, and it has a message.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that black-and-white portraits convey deep messages rather than merely pleasing the viewer.
Don McCullin's quote highlights the power of black-and-white photography as a medium for expression. He suggests that such portraits are not created for aesthetic pleasure, but rather to provoke thought and elicit strong emotional responses. The intention behind the artwork is to communicate a powerful message that challenges or confronts the audience, pushing them to engage with the deeper implications of the image.
In practice
During an art exhibition, to explain the intention behind my work.
I've spent most of my life embracing violence in wars and revolutions. Even a famine is a form of violence. Because I photograph people in peril, people in pain, people being executed in front of me, I find it very difficult to get my head around the art narrative of photography.
I started out on photography accidentally. A policeman came to a stop at the end of my street, and a guy knifed him at the end of my street. That's how I became a photographer. I photographed the gangs that I went to school with.
In my photography, I always lean towards the underprivileged because that's where I came from. When I went to the wars, I attempted to go and stand by those who were being trodden on. By that, I mean people like the Palestinians. When I go to India, I see really the poorest people, and I tend to be drawn to them.
I am sometimes accused by my peers of printing my pictures too dark. All I can say is that it goes with the mood of melancholy that is induced by witnessing at close quarters such intractable situations of conflict and joylessness.
Photography is the truth if it’s being handled by a truthful person.
I'm from England, and like every other great empire who stole bits of the world, there is a price to pay. And I was born in 1935. So, since I've been conscious of the world, I've either been in, or been on the periphery of, a war zone.
When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.
Film is really the one art form that can effectively use silence. Music and theater can play with silence, but they can't sustain silence without losing energy, whereas film can go into a silent mode and stay there for minutes at a time.
What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.
Silence... is the essence of the music itself, the vital ingredient that makes it possible for the music to exist at all.
Whether you like it or not, a child really connects you to that time when everything's new. It's so important - not just for artistic endeavors, but for humanity.
In the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.
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