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 you're writing, you're conjuring. It's a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.
Dancing insists we take up space, and though it has no set direction, we go there together. Dance is dangerous, joyous, sexual, holy, disruptive, and contagious and it breaks the rules. It can happen anywhere, at anytime, with anyone and everyone, and it's free. Dance joins us and pushes us to go further and that is why it's at the center of ONE BILLION RISING.
True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park. At its best it is an emphasis of structure, a realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented
Verses are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals feel how birds fly, and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.
I've made movies that I thought were okay, but then I was very good. And sometimes you're in a movie and you think, 'I wish more people saw that' - because you're good. And it just works out that the movie gets lost. But that's show business.
I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.
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