‘Don McCullin: Broken Beauty’

Holburne Museum, Bath, 30 January–4 May 2026

 

 

 

 

Julian Freeman

 

 

 

 

‘Broken Beauty’ was mounted to celebrate the 90th birthday of Sir Don McCullin (b 1935), and focuses on a recurring, if variable, undercurrent in most of his photographs: damage, caused needlessly, deliberately, usually by humans, or by the passage of time, to people and things. Opening the mostly chronological arrangement of this excellent show is the first of his photographs to be published in The Observer, as challenging today in a black-and-white exhibition print as it was in 1958. The Guvnors in their Sunday suits shows a group of East London toughs, who are framed individually by splintered uprights and beams against the light in a half-demolished building. Collectively, the group, its setting and composition challenge the viewer physically and conceptually, and from that point on it is not difficult to feel that everything in McCullin’s subsequent oeuvre has posed provocative, often uncomfortable, questions for its audience, subtly or directly.

McCullin has always sought his audience’s direct interaction with his subjects. From the hard-edge, close-up of Near Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin 1967, in which a well-maintained American machine gun rests on a German sidewalk, to Hadrian’s Wall in the Snow, with footprints (2009) and beyond, messages continue to be transmitted, and above the run of photos along one wall runs a retrospective statement, as applicable singly or collectively to his work: ‘What I had hoped I had captured was an enduring image that would imprint itself on the world’s memory.’ Anyone whose memory has been impacted by McCullin’s work is unlikely ever to forget it, but just as it will often shock, it can as easily evoke sentiment, as indeed he has always intended it should.

The Holburne has worked a small wonder to deliver such a range of McCullin’s commissioned and independent work in a single room. Its qualitative impact is undeniable, its only likely variable that as a composite its reception may be dependent upon the era in which its audience first engaged with it. It is, nonetheless, a totality, altered – an obvious point – by the transformation of many exhibits from newsprint into exhibition prints, each delivering greater clarity, tone and depth.

 

 

1 Fishermen, Scarborough Beach, by Don McCullin, (b 1935), 1965. Photograph.
© Don McCullin, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

 

 

From his breakthrough in the pages of The Observer (1959–66) (Pl 1) and then, perhaps of more importance, in the pages of The Sunday Times (1966–84), to whose colour magazine he became a regular and admired contributor, McCullin has documented the very worst of a brutal late-20th century and beyond. To anyone who has become his vicarious companion, his overseas travelogues nowadays comprise a fearsomely dangerous catalogue of sectarian violence, in Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Biafra and the Middle East, and among his confrontational pictures of the Vietnam war is one of his most iconic: Shellshocked US Marine, Hue, 1968. Given the timing of this exhibition it is a potent marker, a timely reminder of what a ‘forever war’ can be, and over the years McCullin’s photojournalism remains deeply fearsome, for what it portrays as for the truly life-threatening hazards he experienced in order to put it on the news-stands of Britain.

Against this, it should not be forgotten that McCullin’s documentation of the British industrial landscape and its cities has been almost as confrontational in its mix of accusation and pathos. If in its development it was at times influenced by such figures as Bill Brandt and Roger Mayne, his own influence upon on younger generations of British documentary photographers and filmmakers during the 1970s and ’80s was very considerable. McCullin’s records of the bleak, razed wastelands of Toxteth in Liverpool 8 and the sooty layered grime of the industrial North-east – Early Shift, West Hartlepool Steelworks, Co. Durham, 1963, or Consett, 1974 – or in the heartbreaking scenes of London’s Aldgate and Spitalfields, are memorable as much for what they depict as for the acute sense that the surface dirt is not only tangible, but that any wrecked structure or person beneath it might simply crumble. These will not necessarily be universal recollections for all, but on their first appearance they were surely seminal, truthful portrayals of a post-war Britain, deeply divided by class and by social structures, and their presence alongside the literature of the era still offers a substantial visual backdrop, if one were needed.

Among many of its other strengths, the presence in ‘Broken Beauty’ of the ancient world is of particular importance, and McCullin’s withdrawal from the sharp end of photojournalism has not lessened his longstanding interest in the classical past. This exhibition includes a selection of recent photographs of damaged Roman sculpture in different settings (Pl 2), to all intents matter-of-fact documents drawing clearly on old master paintings to imbue their subjects with personal meaning.

 

 

2 Venus, Palazzo Massimo, Rome, by Don McCullin (b 1935), 2022. Photograph.
© Don McCullin, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

 

 

The sculptures and their photographs are contemplative works that extend the range of McCullin’s interpretation of their subjects and encourage the potential for considered and nuanced audience responses to everything in this exhibition. There is something of Shelley’s Ozymandias running through much of the show, not only in the sand-blown deserts of Sudan (Pl 3), or the wreckage left by ISIS in Palmyra or, at the other end of the scale, in the gloomy thought-provoking landscapes of Somerset.

 

 

3 The Sudan and the place is called Meroë, by Don McCullin (b 1935), 2012. Photograph.
© Don McCullin, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

 

 

It is perhaps brought home most in strong contrasts in the plate of Hadrian’s Wall in the Snow, with footprints – McCullin’s own, pacing first one way and then the other, on a stretch of the Wall, still a substantial structure, but bereft of its crenelation, intention and height, a powerless echo of its Imperial past. On the monochrome print the glare of winter sunlight on the crisply focused snow-covered landscape accentuates the marks left following his passage, to and from an unknown point, bearing a potent message.